Free Gamification Course on Coursera.org

[Amazo]

For those who don't know coursera.org is a website that hosts free online university/college level courses. Anyway today their first Gamification course is starting. If you get in early you can participate in the course structure and get a certificate saying you completed the course, but even if you see this message months or years later the materials will still be online and available.

Here's the url to the course homepage: https://class.coursera.org/gamification-2012-001/class/index

Anyway I figured that this would be of interest to some of the people in this community which was inspired by Leveling up and other gaming principles. Hope to see some NF peeps on coursera.

Oh yeah and when the course wiki opens I'll be posting Steve's TEDx talk.

Cheers

[Guest ApptivGames]

Thanks for sharing the link! I'd love to join, unfortunately we're super busy with development and probably won't have time. Please share the videos and what you learn when you get the chance!

[leadchipmunk]

I signed up, and I'm going to try to keep up with it. I'll definitely report what I learn when I'm done.

Also, anyone else sign up, I say we can use this thread as a study group.

[Crowbeak]

I, too, have signed up for this. I've only watched the first few videos, but it looks like it's going to be great. In the professor's office, I can see Reality is Broken by Jane McGonagal as well as a couple of other books I have heard of but haven't read yet. He points out that the course is tailored towards the theory behind it and business/behavior applications, not to game design. I didn't expect it to be about game design myself, but I'm already familiar with the concept.

[leadchipmunk]

Haven't gotten to watch anything yet, I had to work not long after I signed up. I'll get to it tomorrow when I wake

[Amazo]

Just posted Steve's Life is a Game TEDx talk on the course wiki.

(https://share.coursera.org/wiki/index.php/Gamification:Videos)

[leadchipmunk]

Thanks for the reminder. I took the first test (scored 4.75 out of 5), but haven't started the second week's homework or videos. Looks like I have something to do during work tonight.

[leadchipmunk]

Our second written assignment is due in 42 minutes as I'm typing this comment and I just turned it in, but I thought it was really related to NF, so I'm going to copy the question and my answer here and see what kind of comments you all have on this. I took a lot of the inspiration from the NF challenges, and some other fitness resources I found here (mostly the crossfit levels .pdfs that I've seen linked to on these forums).

Question:

Project Part II: Motivation

You are approached by Ryan Morrison, the mayor of a medium-sized city in the Midwest of the United States. He has heard that you know a lot about gamification and believes that gamification techniques can transform city government.

He would like to start with the health of city employees. The city has 50,000 employees and they happen to have exactly the same rates of obesity as the U.S. average: 34.4% overweight (but not obese) and 33.9% of them are obese. 53.1% of the city’s employees do not meet the U.S. Physical Activity Guidelines for aerobic physical activity and 76% of them fail to meet the Guidelines for muscle-strengthening activity. The city pays for health benefits for its employees and this cost is a huge part of the city budget. Economists in Mayor Morrison’s office have estimated that a 3% improvement in the average physical fitness of city employees would amount to a US$94 million reduction in annual city health costs; a 5% improvement would save US$188 million.

Describe in general terms a gamified system that could effectively motivate behavior change to address the challenge presented above. Specifically, explain how the system would effectively incorporate intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation, or both. Your answer should address the fact that this is an internal gamification project, targeted at the institutional goals of the city government. The system can use any technology (or no technology!), so long as the resources required seem justified by the scope of the opportunity.

Format: Maximum of 500 words. A normal answer will be 2-3 paragraphs of text, and/or a set of bullet points. Your submission should be self-contained (not requiring the grader to view any outside materials) and should provide sufficient details for the grader to understand the basis for your statements.

My answer:

What we have are 3 groups of people: one third of them are obese, one third of them are overweight, and the final third are either at or below a "healthy weight" and therefore seem to be outside of the concern. There also are 2 more ways to classify the people. Those who get enough aerobic activity (~50%) as outlined by the U.S. Physical Activity Guidelines and those who get enough anaerobic activity (~75%).

We need to get a way to motivate these people both intrinsically and extrinsically to increase their aerobic and anaerobic activity while decreasing their weight. (In all honesty, a better way to measure healthiness would be in body fat percentages as weight doesn't factor in amount of muscle versus fat, but that's a discussion for another time.) And this will have to be able to be customized to the individuals' needs, levels of fitness and what they enjoy. This is so they don't feel like they are being forced into working out, but instead find it is something they enjoy doing either for their own health or for the possible rewards they can recieve.

One way to do this would be to have a list of goals and levels of different exercises (such as level 1 of pushups is 10 incline pushups in a row, level 2 is 10 on the knee and level 3 is 10 on the toes) that span a range of possible equipment, muscle trained, and style of activity (lifting versus calisthenics versus cardio). With it set up like this, you can have people set personal goals that they want to work towards within a set period of time (same start and end time for all city employees) that they spend working on these goals.

If they meet the goals, they can level up to the next level of exercise or choose something else and get "health experience." If not, but they made gains, it can still add up to a fewer amount of "health experience." This health experience can be used in 2 ways. It is a general way to guage an individuals' fitness levels and improvements. And it can be spent on getting rewards (this is where the extrinsic motivation comes in), such as a bonus from the savings being healthy has made for the city or recieving fitness based goods/services (guided hiking tour, bicycle, etc.).

The levels should be set up so as no matter where you are fitness-wise, it is relatively the same amount of work to level up and gain approximately the same amount experience to spend on rewards. This will help the majorly obese (which are commonly presumed to be lazy and weak with little-to-no willpower) not to lose their motivation to improve themselves, and can give them an opportunity to try new things that may further motivate them to keep moving along the road to fitness.

By the way, I completed this without viewing any of the videos for this week (sections 5 and 6, total of 11 videos) and wrote it all within 45 minutes, while talking to a couple people on Facebook and texting another person. So, please mind any errors or misjudgments or complete lack of understanding the question that may have occurred.

[Crowbeak]

That's a pretty good entry for missing some of the videos leading up to it. xD I'm having trouble loading the assignment 2 stuff at the moment (thank goodness I already completed my assessments), so I can't currently speak to exactly what grade I would have given you but I think it would have been an 8 or a 10. It's better than most of the ones I did review.

In terms of the assignment, I think you could improve by connecting extrinsic and intrinsic motivation to specific elements of the gamified system. I probably would also have docked you a point for not really addressing the gamified system as internal, since you just kinda restated things at the top and never mentioned it as an internal thing again.

That said, your gamified system looks good to me. I see nothing to complain about in your proposed implementation. I like you you slipped in the body fat percentage thing. I had enough trouble fitting mine into 500 words that I couldn't have spared room for something like that.

[Sinuosette]

Oh, I didn't know there were other students of that class on my favourite forum! I guess i should have guessed it, though!

[leadchipmunk]

That's a pretty good entry for missing some of the videos leading up to it. xD I'm having trouble loading the assignment 2 stuff at the moment (thank goodness I already completed my assessments), so I can't currently speak to exactly what grade I would have given you but I think it would have been an 8 or a 10. It's better than most of the ones I did review.

In terms of the assignment, I think you could improve by connecting extrinsic and intrinsic motivation to specific elements of the gamified system. I probably would also have docked you a point for not really addressing the gamified system as internal, since you just kinda restated things at the top and never mentioned it as an internal thing again.

That said, your gamified system looks good to me. I see nothing to complain about in your proposed implementation. I like you you slipped in the body fat percentage thing. I had enough trouble fitting mine into 500 words that I couldn't have spared room for something like that.

Thanks. This past week got away from me or else I would have watched the videos and actually studied up before attempting the work. So, that's one of the reasons I posted my answer here, outside of how relatable it is to these forums.

And I couldn't be me if I didn't slip that in about bf%. Haha

[Crowbeak]

It's a really fascinating week and I definitely urge you to watch the videos anyway, just in case you weren't planning to. That said, I have access to things again, so here's my answer for Assignment 2:

There are two basic types of motivation: extrinsic and intrinsic. Extrinsic motivation comes from outside factors, but intrinsic motivation comes from within, from a genuine desire to do something because one enjoys it. Since most of your employees don't have sufficient intrinsic motivation to develop healthy habits, the gamified system should be built around extrinsic rewards designed to change their habits. However, since the presence of extrinsic rewards can dampen intrinsic motivation, the framework should be flexible enough to allow those who already enjoy their healthy habits to keep doing so.

Extrinsic rewards can be divided into a few main categories. Different people react favorably to different kinds of rewards, so you'll want to include multiple kinds.

• Status - public recognition
  
• Access - access to previously unavailable information, places, communities, etc.
  
• Power - able to do more things
  
• Stuff - receive physical stuff
  

The first thing to do is create a health tracking/social web site specifically for city employees. Give it good mobile support so they can log in from anywhere, on any device. This will let users easily track what they're doing and get immediate feedback -- small doses of extrinsic rewards that will encourage them to keep up the good work.

Include features that allow users to easily connect to coworkers, friends in other departments, and people they don't know directly but who are interested in the same kinds of health habits they are. The support of friends can actually tap into intrinsic motivation. Create opportunities for simple chatting, too, about anything; if it's a good way to just keep in contact, then people will be drawn back to it regularly.

Have user profiles on which to display recent activity, badges earned for various achievements, and personal records. The badges should cover every kind of health activity you can think of, from eating to different kinds of exercise. And have different kinds of badges for a given type of activity. To use running as an example, have badges for running every day, running long distances, or hitting certain speeds.

Even though you are concerned about certain physical activity guidelines and strength metrics, don't focus solely on things those guidelines measure, like push-ups and running. Consider including badges for things like yoga, which can improve strength, and hula hooping, an aerobic activity. By allowing for different paths to achievement, you give your employees -- your players -- more control and therefore tap into intrinsic motivation a bit.

You can also use leaderboards as a source of extrinsic motivation, but make them about personal improvements in a given block of time instead of an indicator of who has done best throughout their time as a city employee. This will allow new employees to engage without feeling demotivated. Reset the boards periodically and give prizes such as t-shirts, hats, special stickers, or special badges to top participants for that period. Top participants could also be invited to join special groups within the social platform.

I wanted to add more but ran out of space. QQ

[leadchipmunk]

Sounds really good. I'd give you a full 10. And I plan on catching up to the videos too. I'm going to have to do it all tomorrow.

[Sinuosette]

Bringing this thread back to life as the course is complete, yay! I thoroughly enjoyed it, even though it has been challenging to balance my time between everything that is life and the class, but as a true rebel I stuck with it and finished it. I even qualified for the certificate and received full score for Assignment #3 (this one being particularly surprising as I was not satisfied with it at all and was abut to give up)!

Hope you all did well and hope to see you in other classes