Let’s describe how we have conceived the prototype of CRIkour with my teammates of the Master EdTech : Pau Fabregat Pappaterra, Pascal Kolbe ( who is developing Grow, a personal growth platform / game) and Filareti Paka . We’ll see the different steps of the conception from the concept to a public presentation.
The history of the name
Why this weird name ? To help students of the CRI - Center for Research and Interdisciplinarity to manage their project, we decided to get inspiration from Parkour , a tool developed by Codesign it and to add some gamification elements into it. Parkour is a dynamic and non-linear open innovation approach based on simple principles :
- Recursion : consistency between what you are doing, how you do it and why you do it
- Navigation : maximum autonomy is given to well equipped and coached teams
- Monitoring : project and team progress is measured, documented and visible
This process is fostered by choosing different activities called “beacons” step after step. Beacons can be freely defined or chosen among already existing ones. Since it is dynamic, beacons can be changed or adapted as the user advances through his project in an iterative process.
The problem we wanted to tackle
The CRI is a very stimulating and complex teaching and research environment. The multiplicity of projects we have to conduct as part of the Master EdTech, resources, meetings, clubs and people can really be confusing and students can easily be lost. It is very difficult to navigate in the CRI ecosystem and to have a clear picture of what is going on and what background and motivations the people being part of the CRI have.
So we wanted to design a gamified project management tool to help people to finalize their projects, define and reach their goals, document it all of this navigating into the CRI more serenely and effectively.
The solution we’ve designed
The main principles
We wanted to design a framework that could structure a project and at the same time let the freedom to iterate and adapt the learning path through the the CRI. Documentation is a big part of the projects-based learning , so we have tried to implement it in a funny and integrated way which could also track the student’s progress prospectively and retrospectively.
To promote others’ projects discovery and collaboration, we’ve imagined an interface where students could search for any project with keywords or by people, see the current status of project, who does what and offer and/or request help. Helping each other makes everyone better off.
Gamification elements
Let’s now see the game mechanisms we have decided to apply in order to achieve our main objectives and to enhance motivation.
On-Boarding — Customization
By creating an avatar, customizing its appearance, students could appropriate their own story for more immersion.
Skills
This feature allows them to have a positive feedback on how they have improved their skills through their learning path. Gaining some levels could reinforce they will to develop certain skills. Levels and skills are well-known gamification tools.
Exploration
Exploration and discovery triggers curiosity, a big lever for learning. Exploring other projects, discovering new skills, new beacons and other stuff will reinforce their eagerness to learn. The narration is also supported by the visualization of your calendar and beacons in a map screen to see the evolution of your journey.
Community aspects — Leader-board
Seeing other’s projects and progress can create new opportunities for learning and sharing knowledge, but also improve the social recognition we all need as social beings. We have the propensity to compare ourselves to others too, so a leader-board in different skills or categories of skills, with the “most improved coder of the month” could add some fun to it !
The public presentation
As a final work in the Gamed Design course, we had all to describe our work in a public presentation at the CRI — Center for Research and Interdisciplinarity and then let people play the game we had created .
It was also the chance to get some precious feedback and beta-testing. In fact it was the most important part of the exercise, allowing us to have some different perspectives on the project and to identify we hadn’t thought about. Beta-testing is the best way to improve User Experience. In the very rich and abundant feedback, here are some interesting samples :
- Too many features to digest at once: unlock features as you are learning the platform or set if you are an advanced user of project management or not to see all features
- Create dual skill view: skills you self-quantify and skill you have been recognized for
- During on-boarding add people you would like to work with: even if people do not want to, they may be interested in the platform. Users attracting other users to the platform.
The things I’ve learned
In all this project, I’ve learned a lot. First, it is really difficult to implement game mechanisms in a application or something else which is not a game. You would like to add the more gamification into it but at the same time don’t want to make it indegistible. In fact Design needs to be clean and simple in order to improve User Experience, so you have to choose the features you want to integrate carefully. The other main stuff I will keep from this experience is that Gamification is not just about score and level, it’s about narration, fun, and many other mechanisms used in Game Design.
I feel I have much more to learn and try about gamification, specially in Health and Health Education, my main field of interest.
Next step : try to use gamification in an app to make Health Education more fun and motivating. As always I’ll try to document it, It’s just the start of the journey !
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