Title: Work in Progress: Gamification of education: Using Bartle's Taxonomy for inclusive educational practices.

According to an online source [1] in 2021 "the average player plays video games for five hours a day, a 14 percent increase from last year." As participants in the educational system, we might ask how we can make the learning process more like a game? This question leads us to a critical examination of the processes of information transfer prevalent in engineering education. We came to believe that much engineering curricula seek a perpetuation of archaic teaching models where professors are the gatekeepers of knowledge in an age where information is much more readily available than ever before. Game designers have recognized a need to understand how those outside their initial audiences seek pleasure from their game to avoid staleness in an age where information and media is available and consumed in gross quantities. They need to entertain their initial user base and expand beyond it. With a growing desire to make engineering more accessible to a diverse set of individuals, this paper will investigate strategies found in the video gaming industry which have captured the minds of millions of 16- to 26-year-olds. We are using Bartle Player Taxonomy and other reward structures to understand the engagement found in video games with hope that this can be applied to the engineering classrooms to increase student's intrinsic motivation for learning. Because Bartle's Taxonomy does not show up in academic publications, we are also challenging the traditional source of knowledge in academic publications by encouraging innovative approaches found on blogs and video sharing sites. We are not only making educational systems more inclusive but aim to challenge the paradigms about who creates knowledge. To bring this theory-based paper to practice we will include some concrete applications we have experimented with in a virtual reality electrical engineering lab experience at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo (Cal Poly, SLO). We seek input from the community about the theory and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]