Compost Racing and Betting for Education
Last week we held another gsummitX gamification meetup at AOL HQ with a number of new attendees ready to learn and gamify. We were greeted with a great talk from Gilt Groupe Program Manager Jeff Bobula, who walked us through Gilt’s approach to gamified loyalty with their flash-sale site, and a quick demo for our gamified Twitter conference app, Livecube (formerly known as Memecube).
But the big crux of the night was rooted in our gamestorming session to try and solve another problem for Social Good: “How can we get more people to compost?”
There were many great suggestions but the winning idea for the night consisted of creating an internet-connected, smart compost bin that would maintain statistics about the trash collected and send notifications to surrounding neighbors in an area. I was not a formal participant in the game yesterday but hearing all the idea inspired me to come up with an interesting model to raise awareness about composting to promote greater participation:
Let’s make a Compost Racing and Betting System for Classrooms.
Perhaps inspired by SaltyBet.com, I imagined an on-going addition to a school curriculum on biology or earth science that would allow students to observe different piles of compost in very fast time-lapse videos and have them bet on which compost piles decompose the quickest. The teacher can then analyze the “winners/losers” and explain why each pile performed as they did, citing the composition of compost, container for the compost, weather conditions, and any other variable that might affect the speed.
Successful bettors can be placed on a leaderboard and earn perks appropriate for the classroom. An additional class trip could even accompany this game by having students go to a composting plant and creating the most effective pile of compost they can in an attempt to create the “fastest pile”.
The general goal of this plan is to create awareness of composting, educate students about the benefits, and present the concept in a fun-manner to provide positive mindshare and ultimately, composting participation in their own homes. While there are more variables to account for in this idea to make it truely successful, I find that it’s one example of how we can think about something as monotonous as a compost pile and reorganize it into something more interesting.
What do you think? How can you leverage competition and betting elements to make certain ideas more appealing? Submit your ideas below and we will also provide them to
CC Image by Joi
