Designing a Trading Card Game as Educational Reward System to Improve Students' Learning Motivations

Reward is the simplest way to motivate students in education. It can encourage students to learn and get immediate achievement. Moreover, it is also has potential to construct students’ intrinsic motivation. However, traditional rewards are often less valuable thus can’t keep motivating students, e.g. symbolic rewards like stars or stickers can’t be used by the students after the class; therefore, the values of symbolic rewards are not appreciated by the students. This research designs cards of a self-developed computerized trading card game (TCG) as educational rewards in order to inspire students learning, e.g. higher learning performance a student shows up, higher level cards the student would receive from the teacher. And of course, the student would have higher chances to beat other players in the TCG. Through the TCG, the rewards can hold students’ interest for longer.