Application of artificial intelligence in adaptation of gamification in education: A literature review

Abstract The education system has been changing continuously with several new strategies for effective student learning. E‐learning has provided the opportunity for students to learn from anywhere and from anyone. To motivate the learners and improve their performance in e‐learning courses, different pedagogical activities have been practiced among which gamification has a good edge. Gamification is one of the upcoming fields in education for getting students motivated and engaged through game‐like activities with various gamification elements in nongame settings. Gamification can be further improved by dynamically adapting the mechanics and dynamics of gamification to a variety of factors such as the personality, needs, values, performance, and motivations of learners. The advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) enables the development of dynamically adapting gamification environments with established AI techniques. The application of AI in adaptive gamification needs to be further explored to discover new approaches. This study provides a comprehensive report of adaptive gamification from the perspective of the existing studies, which map different gamification elements, user profile elements, and intelligent techniques through a systematic literature analysis. Research questions have been formulated and the findings have been presented by exploring 29 focused studies from a selected pool of 622 research articles. The findings have identified the commonly used gamification elements and presented the methods of incorporating them with various AI techniques based on different user profile elements.