Playing for the public good: Gamification meets citizen science

We all know what the stereotype of a “citizen scientist” looks like. It’s an old guy. Probably retired. Somewhat overly-enthusiastic about nature. In fact, Anne Bowser has a classic picture of three of them joyfully scavenging in the midst of a marsh somewhere.

Bowser, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Maryland’s iSchool, showed the image in her slide presentation earlier this month at Gamification 2013, a conference produced at the University of Waterloo’s campus in Stratford, Ont. While there is much to admire about traditional citizen scientists who devote their free time and energy contributing to important research work, Bowser suggested it might be a different story as the so-called Millennial generation comes of age.

“These volunteers tend to be middle-aged or older, college educated, and motivated by a desire to support their communities,” Bowser said of the traditional citizen scientist. “The problem is, people move. They take up new hobbies. They lose interest.”

Bowser and her colleagues, Jenny Preece (University of Maryland) and Derek Hansen (Brigham Young University) , are an example of a team exploring whether or not gamification might be applied to something other than helping a corporation train its employees or boost engagement in customer loyalty programs. If you can make citizen science a bit more playful, the thinking goes, gamification might be a force for the long-term public good.

“There isn’t any research to suggest that gamification might make (young people) want to participate more. They might actually be turned off,” she admitted. However Millennials do tend to appreciate technology in gaming and have a more positive attitude about the potential for technology to make the world a better place.

 

More coverage of Gamification 2013:

The quest to gamify punctuality, recruiting and task management

Amy Jo Kim makes the case for co-op game design at Gamification 2013

Most critically, a gamified version of a research tool would place less demands on a citizen scientist, allowing Millennials to make short-term contributions rather than committing for months on end.

To find out more, the team created Floracaching, a gamified mobile app that collects data about caches of different kinds of plants that are deemed valuable. The main task is to check caches that already exist by finding them on a Google map (while going on a nature hike, for example), “checking in” to the app submitting photo updates and answering questions.

The gaming elements of the app primarily consisted of badges awarded for participating in these kinds of activities, with a leaderboard that showed overall contributions to the data set.

Floracaching was given to 71 college students aged 18-24 as part of an advanced science and technology program. After turning them loose in the wild to work with the app, Bowser and her colleagues followed up with a survey of open and closed questions to gauge how often they would realistically use such a tool, their motivations and so on.

Bowser described the results were “complex but ultimately encouraging.” Though only 14 percent said they were likely to use the app in the future, “that’s a big jump over the number of those who would normally contribute to projects like this,” she said.

Among the challenges: some participants had trouble recognizing the specific plants and understanding some of the terminology. On the plus side, several students said they enjoyed competing for badges like Paparazzi, which was awarded to those who took the best pictures of a cheery tree. Using a gamified app also meant users had a good excuse to explore their local environment, relax and appreciate the Maryland trees.

“A couple of people mentioned that this would be a good date idea,” Bowser said. Call it UX for millennials.

The Floracaching app, which has since spawned a successor called Biotracker, will be used for further study.