Shaun W. Lawson

Practical, appropriate, empirically-validated guidelines for designing educational games

There has recently been a great deal of interest in the potential of computer games to function as innovative educational tools. However, there is very little evidence of games fulfilling that potential. Indeed, the process of merging the disparate goals of education and games design appears problematic, and there are currently no practical guidelines for how to do so in a coherent manner. In this paper, we describe the successful, empirically validated teaching methods developed by behavioural psychologists and point out how they are uniquely suited to take advantage of the benefits that games offer to education. We conclude by proposing some practical steps for designing educational games, based on the techniques of Applied Behaviour Analysis. It is intended that this paper can both focus educational games designers on the features of games that are genuinely useful for education, and also introduce a successful form of teaching that this audience may not yet be familiar with.

Motivating physical activity at work: using persuasive social media for competitive step counting

Previous research has suggested that social and competitive interaction over online social networking sites could be harnessed in order to motivate behaviour change in users. This paper presents the design and in-the-wild evaluation of StepMatron, a Facebook application designed to provide social and competitive context for daily pedometer readings in order to motivate physical activity in the working environment. A study was conducted in order to determine whether interactions between users via the application more successfully motivated physical activity than simply recording daily step counts in a similar application. Ten participants (1 male), all nurses working in a UK hospital, used the application across two conditions over the course of the study. In the socially-enabled condition, participants could view each others step data and make comparisons and comments. In the non-social condition, participants could only view their own personal step data. A significant increase in step activity was observed in the socially enabled condition. Our findings highlight the potential of social media as a means for generating positive behaviour change. They also suggest that simple mobile devices can function as an inexpensive, accessible and powerful trigger towards this behaviour change without necessitating the use of overly complex and expensive mobile applications or devices.

Watts in it for me?: design implications for implementing effective energy interventions in organisations

The design of technological interventions to motivate behaviour-based reductions in end-user energy consumption has recently been identified as a priority for the HCI community. Previous interventions have produced promising results, but have typically focused on domestic energy consumption. By contrast, this paper focuses on the workplace context, which presents very different opportunities and challenges. For instance, financial consequences, which have proved successful as motivations in the domestic environment, are not present in the workplace in the context of employees. We describe the outcome of a sequence of workshops that focussed on understanding employee perceptions of energy use in the workplace, with the locus of activity on energy intervention design. Using a grounded theory analysis, we produced a framework of key themes detailing user perceptions and energy intervention design considerations. Our findings provide a framework of considerations for the design of successful workplace energy interventions.

Who is on your sofa?: TV audience communities and second screening social networks

Television viewing coupled with audience interaction through a second screen has gained popularity as second screen capable devices have become more pervasive and affordable. In this paper, we investigate the nature of television audiences which engage in second screen interactions. Two different television show audiences are explored though their message activity while using the Twitter social blogging service. Connections are made between users when retweeting messages or mentioning other users in a message. The networks of viewers which are formed when viewers connect through these means reveal different characteristics within the audience networks and imply that different motivations for second screening while watching television shows are in play.

Improving social game engagement on facebook through enhanced socio-contextual information

In this paper we describe the results of a controlled study of a social game, Magpies, which was built on the Facebook Online Social Network (OSN) and enhanced with contextual social information in the form of a variety of social network indices. Through comparison with a concurrent control trial using an identical game without the enhanced social information, it was shown that the additional contextual data increased the frequency of social activity between players engaged in the game. Despite this increase in activity, there was little increase in growth of the player-base when compared to the control condition. These findings corroborate previous work that showed how socio-contextual enhancement can increase performance on task-driven games, whilst also suggesting that it can increase activity and engagement when provided as context for non task-driven game environments.

Gaming On and Off the Social Graph: The Social Structure of Facebook Games

Games built on Online Social Networks (OSNs) have become a phenomenon since 3rd party developer tools were released by OSNs such as Facebook. However, apart from their explosive popularity, little is known about the nature of the social networks that are built during play. In this paper, we present the findings of a network analysis study carried out on two Facebook applications, in comparison with a similar but stand-alone game. We found that games built both on and off a social graph exhibit similar social properties. Specifically, the distribution of player-to-player interactions decays as a power law with a similar exponent for the majority of players. For games built on the social network platform however, we find that the networks are characterised by a sharp cut-off, compared with the classically scale-free nature of the social network for the game not built on an existing social graph.

Validating a mobile phone application for the everyday, unobtrusive, objective measurement of sleep

There is an identified need for objective, reliable, and scalable methods of measuring and recording sleep. Such methods must be designed for easy integration into peoples lives in order to support both sleep therapy and everyday personal informatics. This paper describes the design and evaluation of a mobile phone application to record sleep, the design of which has substantive foundation in clinical sleep research. Two user studies were carried out which demonstrate that the application produces valid measurements of sleep quality and high levels of usability, whilst not seriously disturbing sleep or the sleep environment. These findings suggest that the app is suitable for both everyday sleep monitoring in a personal informatics context, and for integration into sleep interventions.

Blowtooth: a provocative pervasive game for smuggling virtual drugs through real airport security

In this paper, we describe a pervasive game, Blowtooth, in which players use their mobile phones to hide virtual drugs on nearby airline passengers in real airport check-in queues. After passing through airport security, the player must find and recover their drugs from the innocent bystanders, without them ever realising they were involved in the game. The game explores the nature of pervasive game playing in environments that are not, generally, regarded as playful or “fun”. This paper describes the game’s design and implementation as well as an evaluation conducted with participants in real airports. It explores the players’ reactions to the game through questionnaire responses and in-game activity. The technologies used in Blowtooth are, intentionally, simple in order for the enjoyment of the game to be reliant more on the physical environment rather than the enabling technologies. We conclude that situating pervasive games in unexpected and challenging environments, such as international airports, may provide interesting and unique gaming experiences for players. In addition, we argue that pervasive games benefit most from using the specific features and nature of interesting real-world environments rather than focusing on the enabling technologies.

Debating Poverty Porn on Twitter: Social Media as a Place for Everyday Socio-Political Talk

This paper presents an empirical investigation of how people appropriated Twitter for socio-political talk in response to a television (TV) portrayal of people supported by state welfare and benefits. Our findings reveal how online discussion during, and in-between, TV broadcasts was characterised by distinctly different qualities, topics and user behaviours. These findings offer design opportunities for social media services to (i) support more balanced real-time commentaries of politically-charged media, (ii) actively promote discussion to continue after, and between, programming; and (iii) incorporate different motivations and attitudes towards socio-political concerns, as well as different practices of communicating those concerns. We contribute to the developing HCI literature on how social media intersects with political and civic engagement and specifically highlight the ways in which Twitter interacts with other forms of media as a site of everyday socio-political talk and debate.

Tagliatelle: social tagging to encourage healthier eating

This paper describes the design and initial evaluation of Tag-liatelle, a collaborative tagging application for encouraging healthier eating. Users photograph their own meals and upload these photos to a website, where fellow users anonymously tag them for content. Initial results suggest that tagging of food content is a popular activity. However, further work must be done to automate the extraction of valid nutritional information from the tags generated.