Blended Learning Theme

Use principles from video games in non-entertainment ways to make activities more motivating and engaging. Popular in the health and fitness world. You have an activity that you want your users to do more often and you have leaderboards for sense of competition and something to recognise achievement currently three missing ingredients. 1. Need to create meaning. Need to get benefit. Stack overflow valuable to user, foursquare no benefit but only achievements so people leave. Try to offer the user to bring their personal goals to the platform - mint.com or at least have customisable goals. At very least has to connect to interest or curiosity of user. Ensure you are connecting to a meaningful community of interest. Need to have bragging rights with your friends. Focused community boardgamegeek.com. So perhaps you can have community-generated goals. Video games have an overarching narrative and all your micro-goals feed into an overall goal. Missile command. only you can defend your city from nuclear bombs. Crowd sourcing to present political transperancy. Narratively frame this as discover corruption in your area, it becomes meaningful to you. You need to have supporting visuals and copy that cue you into the fictional world around you. The visual carries the story. with meaning there is a danger involved - aloha tries to encourage random acts of kindness. Degrading for the person you treat to act of kindness as they realise you are only doing it for points. Test your environment with non-geeky friends to make sure it doesn't seem awkward. Beware of social context meanings. 2. How to craft an experience so user can gain mastery Achievement is like a skinner box in games world. Progress wars - hit button to gain points, but is not motivating and engaging. fun is just another word for learning Koster, 2005. Fun in learning is the fun of mastering something, the act of solving puzzles and understanding something. why is school (solving maths) not fun and games invol

Guidance for students on effective forums