Gamification - the use of game elements in non-game contexts - represents a promising solution to enhance motivation and engagement in education. Traditional lecture-based teaching has been increasingly viewed as insufficient for effective learning, promoting interest in gamified education to sustain student engagement and foster a positive learning environment. This study presents a comprehensive scientometric literature review on the use of gamification in education, analyzing 9163 manuscripts and over 300,000 references from the Scopus database. Through document co-citation analysis, author co-citation analysis, and keyword co-occurrence analysis, the review identifies the most influential publications, authors, and research trends shaping the field. The findings reveal a research trend that initially focused on game design and best practices but has shifted towards systematic literature reviews and evaluations of gamification's educational effectiveness. Six key research clusters emerged: gamified learning experience, student learning, K-12 education, science education, gamification effectiveness, and gaming elements. The study highlights the growing application of gamification in STEM and formal K-12 education, as well as the increasing relevance of online and personalized learning environments. The review also emphasizes significant research gaps, particularly concerning the long-term impact of gamification, the isolated effects of individual game elements, and the need for improved research methodologies. This review offers a research agenda for future studies, calling for more rigorous, context-sensitive research that better addresses the complexity of gamified learning environments.

The increasing need to address climate change has intensified efforts to promote green transportation options, such as cycling and public transit. Over the past few decades, gamification-the integration of game-like elements into non-game contexts to motivate and engage people in adopting new behaviors-has emerged as a strategy to encourage the use of sustainable transportation. This literature review examines how gamification has been used to drive the adoption of green transportation. Following the PRISMA methodology, 49 documents were initially screened, leading to a final selection of 14 papers. We analyze the stakeholders involved, the game elements, the external rewards (e.g., financial incentives), and persuasive strategies employed, and the overall effectiveness of these initiatives both in the short and in the long term. We also explore the relationship between game elements and persuasive approaches, offering insights into how they are related. Finally, we propose a research agenda that emphasizes the exploration of different game elements and the need for a multidisciplinary approach to designing gameful systems that promote sustainable behaviors.

While the engineering of digital twins (DTs) of cyber-physical systems already faces a number of challenges, DTs of socio-technical systems are made even more complex by human and social factors, and a comprehensive representation of their internal relations is currently lacking. DTs for socio-technical systems could open up new ways of achieving common societal goals by i) providing an understanding of complex interactions and processes, and by ii) facilitating the design of and participation in collective actions. In this context, dynamic adaptation and motivational strategies would be required to swiftly address sub-optimal system behavior. To enable the model-driven engineering of DTs responding to such requirements, we propose a conceptual model of socio-technical systems and discuss it with use-case scenarios. The presented approach supports our vision of future DT-based model-driven interventions, empowering citizens and stakeholders in driving societal change and increasing community resilience.

Tasks performed by users in exchange for some reward, also known as quests or challenges, are one of the essential elements found in gamified systems, including systems for behavioral change. These elements can be tailored to specific players, according to their profile features and past performance, in order to deliver a more personalized and motivating experience. However, in order to automatically generate challenges, a formal, generalizable model of the essential building blocks of such game elements and their internal relations is needed. Although some work has been carried out in the past to define quests and challenges, a widely agreed-upon definition is still missing. Such an abstract definition should be employable across different application domains and scenarios and be flexible with respect to implementation details and human factors. In this work, we employ a model-driven approach to (1) propose a formal definition of quests and challenges in gamified systems, focusing on systems for behavioral change in the mobility domain, (2) model quests by means of a Domain-Specific Language implementing the proposed definition, and (3) take the first steps towards automatic rule generation by demonstrating a mapping between our model and Drools syntax compatible with an existing gamification engine. In particular, we illustrate how to ease the implementation of quests and challenges by using an example from an existing gamified system in the sustainable mobility domain.