Abstract
Challenges in education have continuously been addressed by integrating gamification, but a gap remains for game design principles that support user engagement. This paper outlines results obtained from integrating challenge-based gamification into an elementary school classroom to examine the emergence of student engagement and learning-related behavior. The approach was applied to logical puzzle quizzes where different gamification adjustments were captured and examined using physics' analogy (called the motion in mind concept). The structural experiment, with a mixed methods design, was designed around the notion of time pressure and the difficulty of gamifying the quizzing experience. This model was constructed to validate and expand the quantitative findings (motion in mind model) by including qualitative explorations (thematic analysis). The results revealed the potential synthesis of motion in mind and flow theory, and its relationships to engagement and learning were identified as a new conceptual scheme.