Abstract: Incentives can stimulate learners′ initiative and enthusiasm, and have a profound impact on the gamification teaching design of educational application At present, the mobile learning application in the education market generally favors the use of the point incentive mechanism in game design to guide learning, but when investigating and analyzing the literature on the game-based learning incentive mechanism at home and abroad, it has been found that few studies have been detailed to the point of incentive mechanism In this study, 50 mobile learning applications were selected by stratified sampling, and 23 applications with point incentive mechanism were screened Three point modes of value, experience and mixture are summarized, and  typical cases in each mode are analyzed The four major design principles of point incentive system are further discussed, which are prompt feedback mechanism, internal and external motivation integration, correlation between points and real world, no ethics violation Finally, the common misunderstandings in the design of point incentive mechanism are elaborated, hoping to benefit the design practitioners of educational games and the experts and scholars researching this field

Key words: mobile learning, gamification learning, point system, incentive mechanism