Developing Soft Skills with a Classroom Behavior Management Game: (Abstract Only)

Soft skills such as collaboration, communication and time management are essential to the success of computer science students both in school and after they enter the IT profession. While employers value these skills highly, there are so many technical skills to cover in computer science programs that these soft skills are not typically primary learning objectives for CS classes. As such, it is difficult to find time and space to address them directly. In this study, we investigate whether Classcraft, a game-based classroom behavior management platform designed for K-12 students, can motivate undergraduate students to develop their soft skills in large computing classes. To this end, we utilized Classcraft with 234 students across two face-to-face sections and one online section of an undergraduate "Introduction to Operating Systems and Networking" course to determine whether gamifying the engagement component of the course would motivate students to participate in co-curricular activities, enhance student collaboration and improve communication and time management. There were no in-game activities - the students in each section of the class earned experience points in Classcraft as a reward for completing class activities ahead of time, collaborative learning and teamwork, and asking or answering questions in class or via discussion forums in our learning management system. In this poster, we report our preliminary results of the impact of such a platform on student engagement in soft skills.