What motivates university students to engage in learning computer skills?

In this paper, we present an approach to engage students in learning basic computer skills, in particular on text formatting. We developed a suite of computer tools that manage the direct interaction with students by assigning, correcting, and informing the students. The suite, called ACK, exploits a number of gamification techniques that are covertly inserted in the process. We present a survey of student reception on the effectiveness of these techniques.