Don’t panic – it’s just a video game. Welcome to Neuro-Ludus, a game designed by Montreal researchers to test the effectiveness of gamification in IT training. Its dramatic opening scene is meant to draw players into the game, where they solve various puzzles to win points and advance through 30 levels.

Clearly, this is not traditional tech skills training. And that’s exactly the point.

“This game is very engaging. We wanted it to be accessible for a wide range of people,” says Dr. France Boutin, a professor at the Université du Québec a Montréal (UQAM).

France Boutin, UQUAM

Boutin developed the Neuro-Ludus game with a team that includes Dr. Chris Chinien, president of Compétences/Skills R&D Inc. They cite research suggesting video gamers fare better than non-gamers at multitasking, short-term memory, spatial cognition and information processing – all essential to learning new IT skills. The same research also shows video games help people ‘learn how to learn.’ It’s a transferable cognitive skill that many schools and IT courses ignore, says Chinien.

“They don’t teach people to learn how to learn. They teach subjects,” he says.

The Neuro-Ludus project is underpinned by new research on neuroplasticity as well.

“People thought our brain was fixed or hard-wired, that you’re born and you die with the same kind of cognitive skills and they can’t be changed. Now with recent neuroscience research, we discovered the brain is soft-wired. With training and experience you can alter the way the brain is wired,” says Chinien.

Can video games effectively teach IT skills? Can gamified training rewire the brains of non-techies to help them acquire IT skills faster? Boutin and Chinien’s team built the Neuro-Ludus game to find out.

They’ve put out a worldwide call for volunteers aged 18 and older to test Neuro-Ludus. (Ludus is Latin for ‘game’ or ‘learning’.) The game will be available for test play in French and English for computers, tablets and smartphones from May until December.

Gamified IT training has already been put into play at Launchfire Interactive Inc. The Ottawa firm gamifies consumer promotions and corporate training for clients such as Telus, Costco and Sobeys.

“Probably the coolest (IT training game) we did was for Dell, Intel and Microsoft. All three of them were collaborating to train Dell staff on the value proposition of Dell computers in combination with Intel chips and Microsoft server-side software,” says John Findlay, Launchfire’s chief technology officer.

Each Dell employee was given a virtual budget to build their own data centre by choosing server, chip and software components. If their data centre stayed on budget and successfully completed various tasks (like handling email traffic or shooting down viruses), players earned ‘money’ to upgrade their data centre and move to the next round. (They had a chance to win real prizes as well.)

“The people it was targeted at were both IT folks and salespeople because Dell wanted them to understand some of the complexities and value propositions of these products,” says Findlay. “And the average person played for almost an hour. So in terms of engagement it was one of the more successful (training programs) that Dell had done.”

“The whole process of learning by game is just considerably more fun,” Findlay adds. “And I think it speaks to a realization that people are gradually coming to, that there are better ways to teach people.”

Marchessault’s focus on art and technology runs far beyond the aesthetic and academic. “(It’s) about redefining places where art is shown, getting it out of galleries and museums and putting it in unusual places,” she says. Take Land/Slide, an exhibition she curated last year in the Toronto area suburb of Markham. By placing interactive, multimedia art installations within historic village buildings, the show riffed on themes of history, urban planning, cultural diversity, architecture and environmental sustainability.

The Project: In her ongoing Visible City Project, Marchessault examines how new media technologies and globalization influence artistic cultures in Toronto, Havana and Helsinki. In 2013, Marchessault helped launch Sensorium, a set of labs where academic research meets artistic expression and technological innovation. Part of its stated mandate is to focus on “collaborative methodologies between artists and scientists.” Case in point:  Sensorium’s Future Cinema Lab, where researchers and artists explore new methods of digital storytelling via film, 3D technology, augmented reality (AR), mobile media and interactive Web content.

Sensorium is as much about technology creation as research generation. For Land/Slide, various AR apps were developed at Sensorium so people could use their mobile devices to enjoy an enhanced experience at the show. “That’s one of the research axes that Sensorium engages with: in situ, site specific technologies that exist in the environment and create new kinds of interaction between public spaces and technology,” says Marchessault.

The Progress: While Sensorium, Future Cinema Lab and Visible City are all ongoing long-term projects, Marchessault does have some new irons in the fire. She plans to transform a tiny schoolhouse museum in Toronto’s North York district into a public art installation using various display technologies to explore “the concept of progress.”

The Prospects: Though no commercial activities have come out of her research yet, Marchessault says some of the components developed for Land/Slide (in AR, architectural projection and embedded media) carry the most potential to become licensed intellectual property or be applied to existing products and services.

The Passion: Marchessault believes there’s a global crisis in ecological sustainability. She says digital technology can help engage people in environmental issues – and art in general – by making both seem more accessible and relatable.

“A lot of artists are using new kinds of media – whether it’s mobile phones or large projections or Internet-based artworks – to forge a new space where art can be a means of both creating this public conversation around relational forms of art or in developing new kinds of pedagogies,” she says. “It’s a whole new aspect of public space with all this digital technology. And a whole new concept of engagement.”

After a three-year winless streak at the Strategy Magazine awards, the marketing and communications agency picked up silver in the 2013 media agency of the year category. PHD was also the only Canadian firm to win gold at the 2013 Internationalist Awards for Innovative Digital Solutions in New York. Topping it off, industry bible Adweek named PHD Worldwide its 2013 agency of the year. (Based in Toronto and Montreal, PHD Canada is a division of UK-based PHD Worldwide.)

The kudos come less than 18 months after PHD’s parent company, Omnicom Media Group, got gamified. After a two-year development process (documented in the new book Game Change), Omnicom launched Source. It’s an internal platform used by all Omnicom media planners – including those at PHD Canada – to create media strategy and content for clients. Source is unique from other media planning platforms because it’s gamified, according to company executives.

“It’s kind of like a planning platform on steroids,” PHD Canada’s CEO Fred Forster told us in an interview at the recent DX3 conference in Toronto. “All we’ve done is taken that platform and upped the game, so to speak, by gamifying it.”

As PHD Canada’s senior VP Rob Young explained in a DX3 presentation, all 2,500 employees throughout Omincom’s 76 divisions worldwide are rewarded with points for every new idea they post on Source.

“If you create an in-depth (media) plan very well, you move up the game ladder. And if you contribute to the work others are doing on their plans, you move up the game ladder,” said Young, who is also PHD Canada’s director of insights and analytics.

Point totals and rankings for each office and employee are posted on a global company-wide leader board. Since staff can post ideas for any Omnicom campaign worldwide, it’s an opportunity for cross-border collaboration – and friendly competition – that didn’t exist before.

“There’s the ability to compete on a country by country level, almost like the Olympics,” said Young. (PHD’s Canadian contingent ended 2013 in a respectable third place overall.)

Although staff can’t score extrinsic rewards like cash or Caribbean trips, there “are intrinsic rewards,” said Young. “(It’s) the fact that people are receiving recognition from around the world from their peers and their employers.”

Are there any tangible metrics that demonstrate the ROI impact of Source at Omnicom, like revenue, contract wins or client and sta retention? Forster says it’s still too early to drill for hard evidence of Source’s impact less than 18 months after the platform’s launch.

But top Omnicom executives did credit Source with helping PHD Worldwide land a mega-contract at Unilever in late 2012. Plus, the raft of awards mentioned at the start of this story also flowed PHD’s way after Source was launched. (No word yet on whether Source played a role in Omnicom’s rumoured new $40-$100 million deal with Instagram.)

One thing’s for sure: Canadians have ‘got game’ in Omnicom’s global gamification effort. For 2013, the individual points winner among all 2,500 employees worldwide was Tammy Gardner, group account director at the Toronto office of PHD Canada’s Touche division.

Nolan is autistic. A high school dropout, he didn’t learn to read properly until his late teens or write properly until his twenties. Following what he calls “a string of dead end jobs,” Nolan returned to high school after finding an inclusive learning environment – one that encouraged him to discover his own unique interests and strengths.

Jason Nolan,
Ryerson EDGE Lab

Nolan became a man of letters: B.A., B. Ed., M.A. and Ph. D. He got his first full-time job at 43. He was diagnosed as autistic at 45. Today he researches play, privacy, gaming, virtual worlds, informal learning environments and adaptive design for children with disabilities.

The Project: Nolan co-authored the 2013 research paper ‘Beyond gamification: reconceptualizing game-based learning in early childhood learning environments.’ It challenges the idea that digital game-based learning (DGBL) will revolutionize education in schools. In fact, DGBL may become just another way of standardizing the data-driven, top-down education models that “continue to transform learning and play into joyless performance and productivity outcomes,” he writes.

“The important aspects of learning that occur when children and adults play are exactly what gets filtered out through gamification,” Nolan says. “That leaves only the ‘game layer’, surface-level game features such as badges, achievements or rewards and other ‘incentives’ for consumer loyalty.”

The Progress: Now that he’s finished and released the aforementioned research paper, Nolan is focused on completing a study he began in 2010 on informal learning.

“My research suggests that the value of games and play – for both children and adults – isn’t found in the rhetorics of competition, winning and achievement. It’s actually found in the very elements that gamification leaves behind: the choice of how and when we play, the privacy and autonomy to not be observed and judged while playing, and opportunities to explore experiences that are of intrinsic interest to us,” Nolan says.

The Prospects: “Our work would be of greatest use to the commercial and educational sectors that are interested in moving beyond gamification,” Nolan says. “This next level involves creating environments and contexts where all the elements of informal learning can be accommodated in formal learning environments. Those elements include a choice of what we play, who we play with, how we play, and particularly the contexts in which we play.”

The Passion: As someone who discovered his own particular learning style later in life, Nolan pushes back against educational models that herd all students into the same enclosed box.

“I’m motivated by a desire to help people understand there are ways to successfully bring game-based learning and experiences to students and the public in general,” says Nolan, “ways that don’t seek a one-size-fits-all ‘solution’ to the problem of engaging students, clients and customers.”

After finally finding his own way of learning, Nolan has also found a way to teach others about inclusive education in his own unique voice. As he declared in one self-penned online biography, “I am very happy with who I am and would never want to be anyone else.”

photo credit: One Laptop per Child via photopin cc

An online overhaul was long overdue. When U of O launched its site back in 1997, Bill Clinton was starting his second presidential term, the first Harry Potter novel was hitting bookstores and Steve Jobs had just returned to a sinking ship named Apple.

Despite a small-scale update in 2012, U of O’s website still needed work.

“We did a little refresh but could only affect the top layer. To go deeper than that we had to transform the whole approach,” says Nichole McGill, director of web communications at the University of Ottawa.

Rebooting a website after 15 years is no overnight task, especially when it draws 4.6 million clicks a month and 51.5 million visits per year.

McGill knew the key lay in user experience. But unlocking UX is daunting for a website with such varied users: students, prospective students, parents, faculty, staff, news media, alumni, donors, researchers and corporate partners. On top of that, as the largest bilingual university in the world, its website must be fully functional in French and English.

UX was gauged by crunching analytics from the site and also consulting real users – including over 5,000 students – about what worked and what didn’t.

“We did internal interviews with all the (university’s) important stakeholders. They got the business point of view of what they needed to communicate (on the site). Then they did one-on-one user surveys and usability testing with the students, future students and the guidance counselors. Journalists, donors, alumni, professors and employees (were consulted) as well,” says McGill.

A major common complaint? Complicated menu and navigation features. Another was the lack of cohesion between the university’s main website and separate sub-sites for various faculties and departments.

The biggest shocker? The top reason alumni visited the original website wasn’t to look up old classmates, homecoming events or ways to donate money. It was to search for courses. McGill says those kinds of surprises – the nuances missed by analytics alone – are the reason the best UX design includes human feedback, not just hard numbers.

“You can think and make assumptions” about users, she says, but “analytics only gets you so far.”

The new website debuted in November 2013. This one’s designed with mobile devices in mind. The most noticeable thing is what’s not there: clutter. There are just four main icons dominating the middle of the home page; smaller sub-categories sit across the top and bottom. Every element on the page is simple – even if getting them there wasn’t. An original list of the top 400 tasks among site visitors was whittled down to 75. That list was refined even further through user surveys and testing.

The re-launched website is a better experience for the people who manage it, too. It has a new open source Drupal content management system. (All U of O sub-sites are gradually moving to Drupal as well, for more cohesive design and navigation.) Drupal makes it easier to integrate external web content into the university’s websites, regardless of the code it’s built on.

The Big Overhaul is over. But the university is still consulting users. The new site has already been tweaked based on comments from the feedback section. Tweets and other social media posts have also become part of the ongoing UX design process – in the most public, immediate sense imaginable.

“If it isn’t great,” says McGill, “your users will tell you right away.”

The Project: Spongelab Interactive provides game-based learning tools and consulting – both open-source and commercial – for public and private sector clients. Since 2007 it’s delivered over two million pieces of educational content to users in over 160 countries. In Spongelab’s Transcription Hero game, you get to rock out while racing to transcribe DNA sequences on a Guitar Hero console. “Games are engaging and exciting. From our side, games are the most sophisticated learning tools we’ve ever advanced to,” says Friedberg.

Behind all the fun and games is some serious scientific research, he adds: “All the design of it has been research driven. Research is in everything we do and approach.” Friedberg is particularly interested in researching how games can be used to tailor learning experiences for each unique person. “It’s to understand how you, as an individual, learn. It’s stripping off content and process and looking at who you are as a user and thinking of you as a person. You’re an intelligent, emotional person driven by all sorts of things. Those other one-size-fits-all approaches usually fail completely – not just in education but in all areas.”

The Progress: “We have lots of (research) projects on the go,” says Friedberg. “We have a game-based learning project in collaboration with Centennial College funded partially through NSERC (National Science and Engineering Research Council). That project’s geared to the general public, to make tangible, personal connections to your learning.”

Friedberg has also submitted new research proposals to York University and the University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT). It’s an ongoing process of uncovering how game-based technology helps us learn, he says. “We have research applications in process. We publish (findings) but the research never ends.”

The Prospects: Friedberg’s own personal website states that he currently has two patents pending but provides no other details. Though we poked around for ways his research might take a specific commercial spin somewhere down the road, he’s staying mum for now. “Any sort of commercialized venture you’re in, you can’t talk about publicly until it’s released,” he says.

The Passion: “I’ve always liked research as a whole,” says Friedberg. “It’s being able to discover some very complex things that are very tangible to people around you and very personal to yourself.”

For Friedberg, part of that personal discovery process was deeply painful. He floundered throughout school until finally discovering in third-year university that he learns best through visual and spatial means, not printed words.

“I grew up and struggled with that,” he says. “If my work can help other kids not feel like they’re dumb simply because they’re not getting an ‘A’ on a multiple choice test, that’s worth it.”

That’s the approach being taken by Dandy, a graduate of Waterloo, Ont.’s Hyperdrive incubator. With an initial product that came straight out of academia, the startup is changing the way apps make the journey from idea to iPhone, so to speak, including an initial launch. With so many apps now on the market – over two million in the iOS and Android app stores combined – Dandy hopes crowdsourced development will prove a commercialization vehicle that offers better odds of success.

“Developers are no longer wanting to take the chance of building an app. Maybe the gold rush is over,” says Dandy co-founder and CEO Matt Scobel.

Dandy’s Matt Scobel

He’s referring to a time when there were fewer apps available and most cost $1.99 or 99 cents. Now there are more apps competing for users – and most are free. That means it’s harder to grab people’s attention with new apps and tougher to make money from them, usually through ad content or in-app sales. In such a cluttered, competitive market, it’s risky to even build a new app, says Scobel.

“That’s where we come in. We can be the platform that helps decide what gets built and put into the app store,” he says.

The first app to come out of the Dandy model just hit the market. Picture This, a social scavenger hunt app using photographs, is free on iOS and BlackBerry and coming soon to Android and Google Glass. Niger Little-Poole, who posted the original idea, recently helped the Dandy team promote Picture This at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. Not bad for a student at New York’s Columbia University.

The Dandy way to create an app

Here’s how it works: you post your idea for a new app on Dandy’s Web site; then fellow members of Dandy’s online community post feedback on your idea and vote for the app ideas they like best. Dandy’s development team takes the most popular app ideas into the design phase. After beta testing (also by Dandy’s online community), the finished apps are released on app stores.

Each individual who contributed to the development process shares in any proceeds from the app. (Unlike Kickstarter, Dandy can’t let users directly raise money to develop their apps because equity crowdfunding is illegal in Canada.)

Can’t people just develop apps on their own instead? They can, says Scobel, but an app put out using the ‘build it and they will come’ approach is likely to get lost in the crowd.

“Nobody ever sees it. It never gets feedback from customers. The design maybe doesn’t get done properly. So come to Dandy and work on an idea you really love. But work on it with a lot of people what also feel that way. And if it is successful, have a chance of sharing in the proceeds from it with the community,” Scobel says.

Dandy used its own in-house developers to complete the technical work on Picture This so it would be ready in time for CES. For future Dandy apps, however, Scobel hopes the design and coding work can also be crowdsourced by technical contributors all over the world.

It’s a change, but one that would still be in line with Dandy’s slogan, “It takes a community to raise an app.”

The Canadian Youth Business Foundation is out to change those odds with a series of workshops dubbed The Big Idea Labs. They’re based on the DIY Innovation Toolkit created by Dr. Alex Bruton (who’s known in startup circles as The Innographer). Designed for innovators aged 18 to 39, the workshops touch down in eight Ontario cities starting Jan. 27. We touched base with Dr. Bruton to get the lowdown on the Labs – and find out if ‘innographer’ is, in fact, a real word.

What’s the goal of The Big Idea Labs, especially in terms of possible commercialization? 

It’s capacity building to help people develop really big value ideas. We see so many entrepreneurs working on ideas that aren’t either impactful or feasible and this helps them become both impactful and feasible. It’s designed to help them move through that process: from an initial concept, to building a company around science or technology, to accelerating a project to really change the market.

There’s already a flurry of startup programs and events available. Why do we need something like this today? 

For every 3,000 raw ideas that pop into people’s heads, only one of those goes on to become a success. Five years later, one third of them have failed. And only five to six per cent of (successful ideas) are high impact. So this is a deliberate approach (to) designing the big impact ideas.

There’s so many entrepreneurs in love with their idea but who may not realize the fairly simply ways they can significantly improve their odds of success. We tell them: when you get the chance, don’t play the odds – change your odds. We give a very specific methodology for changing your odds.

There are two parts to the workshops: The Big Idea Pressure Test and The Big Idea Traction Studio. What’s the difference between them?

The first one is an orientation to a different mindset and way of thinking. It’s getting people to understand those odds of 3,000 to one and really building a toolset. Then they’re required to test those tools and test their concept; that’s where the term Pressure Test comes from. The second workshop, the Traction Studio, is where we try to dig deeper and get traction on the ideas. We exercise the tools and there are three additional tools added to them. The idea of the second workshop is to take them from their starting point to something that’s highly feasible and highly impactful.

Are The Big Idea Labs aimed at a certain type of industry or are they wide open to all sectors? 

The CYBF is doing Big Idea Labs to target STEM fields. But my original innovation toolkit – which The Big Idea Labs are based on – is for both tech and non-tech (fields). It’s really designed to be a general tool across all those domains.

The CYBF is only holding Big Idea Labs workshops in Ontario. Will it be expanded to other parts of Canada? 

There’s not a current commitment to that right now. Similar tools are offered in different places through my company. But the CYBF’s version is just (offered) in southern Ontario at this point.

The Innographer is the name of your Calgary consulting firm. It’s also become your pseudonym. But is ‘innographer’ a real word? 

I made it up, actually. We so often have preconceived notions of what innovation is. I intentionally tried to come up with a word that would be different, to make people think about what it is they’re doing and what their preconceptions are. Where it comes from is ‘innovation’ mixed with the suffix ‘-graphy’, like in ‘photography.’

Would you ever try to trademark the word ‘innographer’? Then you could commercialize a word you innovated…

I do have it trademarked, actually. But I don’t plan to make any money off of it. The goal was just to protect it from being used for other things.

It’s still pretty cool that you trademarked a word. 

Thanks, thanks very much.

Just last month Sony filed a patent for its sensor-filled SmartWig concept, which the company says could be used for everything from health-care monitoring for elderly users to virtual reality gaming. But it does prompt a few hair-raising questions. How would it stay on your head? Could you swim in it? Would wearing a hat affect signal quality to the sensors?

Welcome to the brave new world of UX design for wearable technology.

“The challenge is to bridge the gap between aesthetics and the functional,” says Pardo Mustillo, VP of research at viiglobal Inc., a Montreal firm which aggregates data from wearable health-care devices and creates apps that analyzes it.

Samsung’s Gear watch and Nike’s Fuelband fitness tracker are bringing wearables into the consumer mainstream. Google Glass could be mass released as early as this year. Gartner expects the global market for wearable tech to hit $10 billion by 2016.

Wearable is looking like the Next Big Thing. It’s not only because all the biggest corporate players (Google, Samsung, Nike, etc.) are pursuing the sector. It’s also because consumers are demanding technology that’s more personal than ever before. A generation raised on a relentless stream of Facebook updates and Instagram selfies wants information that is essentially all about them. Wearable technology is the newest way to tell consumers a never-ending story about themselves, then share it with the rest of us for purposes of comparison and competition.

In Canada, University of Toronto professor Steve Mann has been called the “father” of the wearable computing and recently discussed how the sector is evolving in a TEDx talk, shown below.

Wearable tech has been around in various forms for decades. But it’s seen some quantum shifts lately: from active data input to passive data collection; from single to multi-purpose use; and from specific occasional use to 24/7 wear.

Jawbone’s Up wristband is a good example. It automatically monitors various data like your activity level, sleeping patterns and mood. And you can wear it all day and night, even in the shower.

“When you’re designing for these new devices you want to keep it as simple and non-invasive as possible so it becomes part of the fabric of everyday life,” says Mustillo.

The same issues surrounding big data in other tech streams are also emerging with wearable technology. One of them is how to dig through the sheer volume of wearable data to make it relevant to users.

Says Mustillo: “There’s so much junk data that to filter through that and get the gems out requires you to develop very sophisticated algorithms that are time sensitive and may not be valid next week.”

By junk data he refers to the fact that although sensors can now collect all sorts of data about us – like how many times you move, breathe or blink take in a day – it’s all rubbish unless it’s correlated and analyzed in a way wearers can use for practical purposes.

Complicating that further is the lack of consistent application programming interfaces (APIs) to integrate the various forms of data from wearables, says Mustillo. In addition, data privacy and security are concerns.

“There are also security issues if you’re going to share, retrieve and store that information. How do you get access to it? Who can you share it with?” Mustillo says.

Mustillo points out that in certain sectors like health care, wearable tech is also subject to specific regulatory laws: “In the U.S. some wearable devices have been pulled off the market because they’re doing things that require FDA approval.”

How will the new developments and challenges in wearable technology affect the skill sets demanded of UX designers?

“The design process is still the same, just using a different medium,” says Olivier Mayrand, designer and co-founder at Kiwi Wearable Technologies  in Toronto. “It’s definitely something to get used to. But from the designer’s perspective they’re going to be using a lot of the same tools.”

Mustillo disagrees, a more complex UX design frontier that may, in fact, require various skills residing beyond just the UX designer.

“(That’s) what I’m seeing as you get more and more into the devices that cross boundaries of fashion and technology,” he says. “Whereas in the past you could have one designer designing an interface for a web app or a mobile app, now we need teams of people that have different levels of expertise.”

“There are the basic skill sets you need for anything, whether designing for the web or a desktop app or mobile device,” Mustillo continues. “With wearable clothes with sensors embedded in them, you start getting into industrial design and fashion.”

And you wouldn’t want an industrial designer making a wig for you or your own fashion forward buddies, would you? Unless a stylist with a head for presentable pates was also consulted, of course. Which speaks to the unique challenge UX designers have ahead of them with new wearable technologies: to weave (literally) the fashionable with the functional and make the most personal computing that’s ever existed fit comfortably like a second skin.

“I’m what is called a behavioural economist,” says Soman. “I study economic decision making through the lens of psychology, primarily in the financial well-being domain … but also in the context of healthcare and well-being in general, like healthy eating. We’re trying to understand how (individual) people make choices vs. the economy as a whole and how can we actually influence those choices. Behavioural change is really what I’m interested in within different domains.”

The Project: Soman’s latest research looks at how gamification can be applied most effectively in education and training. His goal, he says, was to add quantifiable, evidence-based research depth to an emerging field that’s still top-heavy with theory.

“The challenge is that (gamification’s) a new science. We haven’t had this for many years. So there’s a lack of empirical research on this stuff,” says Soman.

“We thought, let’s try and look at successful cases where people have gamified education and break down how they went about it and almost write a guide book about it. That’s what we’ve done in this particular piece. So they’ll now know how to start the process (of gamifying education).”

The Progress: In December 2013, Soman and colleague Wendy Hsin-Yuan Huang published their findings in the research paper “A Practitioner’s Guide to Gamification of Education.” Based on five case studies from the real world, the authors lay out five key steps to deploying gamification in education and training. Among the juicier takeaways: games can’t (and shouldn’t) replace human teachers entirely. And those social leader boards publicly displaying player standings – turns out they can backfire by discouraging some students from playing at all. That’s a shame, literally.

Soman’s not done playing in the gamification research sandbox just yet. Over the coming year, he’ll run new experiments in the lab and online to further test the effectiveness of rewards, levels, badges and other strategies. “We need to construct real life situations and track all these success stories,” Soman says.

The Prospects: Soman is a big proponent of open source research, so commercialization isn’t his ultimate goal. Yes, outside suitors have already come calling to float the idea of commercialization with him. But Soman has so far rebuffed them all. “I think it’s too early…without enough empirical evidence,” he says. Still, he concedes that one day a commercial software program could potentially come out of his research, automating the experiments to isolate the effective gamification strategies from the weaker ones with greater probable accuracy and speed.

The Passion: The ability to do research that can help people fairly quickly keeps Soman pursuing behavioural science. “Because most of my research is about helping people help themselves, it’s interesting,” says Prof. Soman. “And with the study of behavioural change, you can actually see the results of your research very quickly. In most of my work you can actually see results within six months. I (help) economists who’ve tried to change behaviour for years and years…and suddenly it starts changing behaviour quickly.”