How a driver’s ed app is getting learners in gear

Everybody likes passing the road test that gets them a driver’s licence, but unless you can gamify it, the journey to that step is usually anything but fun.

Zachary Fitz-Walter, a PhD candidate at the Mobile Innovation Lab at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Brisbane, Australia, has been using an app to help learners complete the 100 hours of supervised practice they need in order to take their test in Australia. By offering a series of test questions and other gaming elements, the app was designed to help students fill in a logbook of practice they are mandated to keep in a more enjoyable way.

Fitz-Walter, who presented his research at the Gamification 2013 conference in Stratford, Ont., said there are some tricky aspects to developing a gamified app for driver’s ed. For example, the app doesn’t encourage competition between learners so as not to encourage any risky behavior. It also had to adhere to laws regarding the use of mobile phones in the car.

Among a group of 16 to 24-year-olds, Fitz-Walter and his team offered both a gamified and non-gamified version of the app to test the results and interviewed them after they’d used it.

“Learnability was one of the issues that arose. The gamified version was harder to use,” he said. There were also some playability issues, where in certain cases learners weren’t sure of what to do next in the game. On the other hand, “they preferred both apps to a logbook.”

Download Fitz-Walter’s research, Driven to drive: designing gamification for a learner logbook smartphone application to learn more.