Gamified compliance training app TrueOffice is on a hot streak lately as they’ve just announced a new partnership with Thomson Reuters shortly after news of their $3M Series A Funding.
Big class lectures can often be a painfully boring but inevitable part for any college student. It may be surprising to some but professors can be just as bored by the class material they have to teach. This has led to a growing movement by teachers and professors to innovate the teaching practice with the primary goal to better engage their students.
Among those trendsetters is Professor Cliff Lampe from the University of Michigan who has been using gamification to teach his undergraduate seminar classes. As an assistant professor at the university’s School of Information, Professor Lampe conduct classes for the undergraduate program in informatics. What he is currently most well known for is his use of gamification elements and principles in his 200 person introductory lecture.
Audi Canada set forth to display the new Audi A4 Quattro’s handling abilities in a slot car circuit featuring an iPad controller, full HD camera action, and a chance to win the chance to test drive an Audi R8 around a real race track.
Game based learning is taking a specialized cultural approach with a new app designed to “engage and educate New Zealand School children.”
Acording to tangatawhenua.com (Maori News & Indiginous Views):
New Zealand has one of the highest proportions of disengaged students of any OECD country. The majority of students in low decile schools are Maori and are more likely to leave school educationally disadvantaged.
It has been proposed that an accelerated roll-out of e-learning to schools and improving the school-to-work transition may reduce youth unemployment and the resulting social issues.
The gamification of recruitment has been a very creative way to find and bring talent to your company without going through a costly recruiter. Given the recent success of recruiting games by Dominos, Quixey, and even the Air Force, it’s become clear that using games can be a viable strategy. One startup by the name of Wibidata took this idea to the next level and hired a game designer to create a Portal 2 game mod that would get over 75,000 impressions and 100 qualified job applicants in a single week.
The folks at Keas have been working hard at improving workplace productivity by focusing on making corporate wellness more engaging. Yesterday, they’ve unveiled the Keas 360/365 Platform to deliver a new product ecosystem and enterprise platform that will engage its users with healthy habits in and out of the workplace.
Rice University is piloting English 312, Scandinavian Fantasy Worlds: Old Norse Sagas and Skyrim, for the Spring 2013 semester. Research into the benefits of using video games as an educational tool is vast and has been advocated by people such as Jane McGonigal and Katie Salen. Even Berkeley has taught a game theory course with respect to Starcraft II, and it has been shown to improve critical thinking and analytical skills.
We’ve noticed that there are very few resources for individuals wanting to learn more about companies in the gamification space. The kinds of question we continue to observe on a regular basis look like:
There are valid questions for someone looking to explore the space but its not always apparent where one can start, which is why we built two resources for anyone curious about gamification to explore: The Gamification Buyer’s Guide and The GBase.
Possibly taking some inspiration from the NFL, the LA Dodgers have created a new social rewards program to give out prizes and promote more fan loyalty online and at the field at Dodger Stadium
The premise is the same as most other social rewards: participate in the team’s social media accounts, compete in leaderboards, earn points, and redeem them for prizes.
Why is it that the Europeans are the ones doing really cool shit with gamification? Here in the states it seems a new gamified app is released daily in the hopes of getting each of us to run a little bit faster, stay a bit more organized, get our kindergarteners to read more, or increase our personal sales goal (exponentially in many cases). We are each in a constant race to improve ourselves, and we’re doing it with applications and objectives that would make Mr. Rogers and the Elders in the Church of Latter Day Saints smile. It’s all so boring.
Europeans on the other hand tend to create quirky games to get citizens to obey the speed limit, decrease the rate of public urination, or promote safer sex practices in young people. They’re jogging on a steady sprint toward better conditions for society at large. These games tend to be fun, involve entire communities and take players away from their smart phones into an gamified reality. And when they don’t like what society is doing? Well then some decide to create a game to bring that society down.
