Open Access

Maria Rauschenberger, Jörg Thomaschewski, Menno Ternieden, Andreas Willems

• Gamification is an established concept to apply game elements in different contexts to engage and motivate users. Gamification has been successfully used in various use cases and applications as well as general frameworks have been established. To support the design of learning environments in order to improve students' engagement and motivation, applying the concept of gamification is beneficial to emphasize engagement and motivation. This article presents the results of a literature review performed to examine the systematic use of gamification in learning environments. Therefore, ten frameworks matching the search criteria of the systematic literature review are analyzed. The results show that game elements are used heterogeneously and game elements related to the emotions and progression are preferred in learning environments. Because of the diversity of game elements used in the applications analyzed, no reliable standard can be given to design gamified learning environments with game elements. Instead, we provide a short overview of how game elements have been applied in the different application context. As gamification is a relatively young field of research, future work is necessary to give a comprehensive assessment of the topic.