The college experience is enlightening, empowering, educational, but can also be overwhelming and stressful. If one investigates the atmosphere at your standard university campus, there is no doubt that all students are exhausted in their own unique way. The various responsibilities and obligations inherent in the academic course load, student organizations, sports teams, and other extracurricular activities that a student commits to fosters this stress. A common pattern, especially among students, is the progression from stress to exhaustion to lack of motivation, or helplessness. The Mayo Clinic published an article stating: “when stress begins to accumulate from negative or challenging events in life that just keep coming, you can find yourself in a state of feeling emotionally worn out and drained” (https://www.facebook.com/MayoClinicHealthSystem, 2020). That being said, the implementation of gamification in the college experience can significantly improve intrinsic motivation within students, thus reducing the stress and exhaustion. Gamification with regards to higher education is the use of game design elements in non-game contexts in order to engage and motivate learners. The primary purpose of gamification is to make learning more fun and interesting, as well as to increase learners’ engagement, motivation, and productivity. Video games and the concept of gamification in general have shown positive signs of relieved anxiety and increased enjoyment in many different aspects of life, such as education. The overarching goal of introducing gamification into the college environment is simple: To increase satisfaction, learning, participation, engagement, and retention among the student population.

The college experience is enlightening, empowering, educational, but can also be overwhelming and stressful. If one investigates the atmosphere at your standard university campus, there is no doubt that all students are exhausted in their own unique way. The various responsibilities and obligations inherent in the academic course load, student organizations, sports teams, and other extracurricular activities that a student commits to fosters this stress. A common pattern, especially among students, is the progression from stress to exhaustion to lack of motivation, or helplessness. The Mayo Clinic published an article stating: “when stress begins to accumulate from negative or challenging events in life that just keep coming, you can find yourself in a state of feeling emotionally worn out and drained” (https://www.facebook.com/MayoClinicHealthSystem, 2020). That being said, the implementation of gamification in the college experience can significantly improve intrinsic motivation within students, thus reducing the stress and exhaustion. Gamification with regards to higher education is the use of game design elements in non-game contexts in order to engage and motivate learners. The primary purpose of gamification is to make learning more fun and interesting, as well as to increase learners’ engagement, motivation, and productivity. Video games and the concept of gamification in general have shown positive signs of relieved anxiety and increased enjoyment in many different aspects of life, such as education. The overarching goal of introducing gamification into the college environment is simple: To increase satisfaction, learning, participation, engagement, and retention among the student population.

The goal of this creative project was to create a card-based game relevant to a functional anatomy course. This game would facilitate learning of the muscles, their origins and insertions, and the joint actions to which they strongly contribute. In order to create an effective study tool for memorization and retention, we utilized aspects of cognitive load theory, as well as emotional design principles, including gamification. We focused on the three types of cognitive load: (1) intrinsic cognitive load (the inherent complexity of the learning material), (2) germane cognitive load (the capacity of working memory to create cognitive schema), and (3) extraneous cognitive load (aspects of a learning task that do not contribute to the learning goal). Our goals for effective game design were to increase germane load, decrease intrinsic load, and decrease extraneous load. Additionally, emotional design principles and gamification were used to elicit positive emotions regarding the learning material to increase the amount of working memory load dedicated to learning, rather than extraneous processing.