The integration of gamification into digital learning environments is reshaping educational models, advancing towards more adaptive and personalized teaching evolution. However, within large Chinese corpora, the transition mechanism from passive participation to adaptive gamified learning remains underexplored in a systematic manner. This study fills this gap by utilizing LDA topic modeling and sentiment analysis techniques to delve into user comment data on the Bilibili platform. The results extract five major themes, which include multilingual task-driven learning, early-age programming thinking cultivation, modular English competency certification, cross-domain cognitive integration and psychological safety, as well as ubiquitous intelligent educational environments. The analysis reveals that most themes exhibit highly positive emotions, particularly in applications for early childhood education, while learning models that involve certification mechanisms and technological dependencies tend to provoke emotional fluctuations. Nevertheless, learners still experience certain challenges and pressures when faced with frequent cognitive tasks. In an innovative manner, this study proposes a theoretical framework based on Self-Determination Theory and Connectivism to analyze how motivation satisfaction drives cognitive restructuring, thereby facilitating the process of adaptive learning. This model demonstrates the evolutionary logic of learners’ cross-disciplinary knowledge integration and metacognitive strategy optimization, providing empirical support for the gamification learning transformation mechanism in China’s digital education sector and extending the research framework for personalized teaching and self-regulation in educational technology.
Ding et al. (Thu,) studied this question.