The City of Charlottesville is attempting to win a $5 million Georgetown Energy Prize. To contribute to this effort, we teamed up with the city to develop a mobile app that uses gamification to promote energy savings.
The app challenges users to complete quests related to saving energy. Some quests involve taking actions in the home while others are designed to simply inform. The app will contain a store in which active players can purchase rewards.
Bookmark is a card game that supports student's improvement in critical reading skills. Students develop their own deck of cards after reading a text and play a board game in which they play cards to build chains off of other player's cards.
Bookmark is being used in middle schools in central Virginia, and we hope to continue studying its efficacy in the classroom.
This project focuses on the development and study of a tool called GamerCard that supports the gamification of college coursework.
The system supports using experience points (XP) and victory points (VP) for a unique articulation of grading systems. The system provides a store in which power-ups can be purchased, etc. We study the various ways gamification might improve college courses.
For this project, we utilize student input to an intelligent tutor and automatically construct an Expert Knowledge Base. Expert Knowledge Bases
are effective domain models for providing dynamic intelligent feedback. We mine large amounts of student input, and construct accurate domain level knowledge
bases from this data.
In addition, we utilize game mechanics to improve the efficacy of our approach. We attempt to show that game like mechanics can improve student input. Additionally,
we have designed Knowledge Refinement Games, which we use to crowdsource input that refines the knowledge in areas that are unconfident.
Rashi Game is a 3D educational experience based on the Rashi Intelligent Tutoring System (see below). Students take on the role of a doctor, explore a hospital, and attempt to diagnose patients. The purpose of this project is to begin to explore the differences between learning with traditional tutoring systems and educational games.
Rashi Game is unfortunately not currently available for download, but is coming soon...
Rashi is an inquiry based tutoring system used to teach various subjects through exploration. Students are invited to explore specific cases in their field. They form hypotheses, collect data, and collaborate with others. Rashi implements cases in various fields such as Biology, Art History, and Forestry.
If you would like to try out Rashi, the download and instruction can be found at This Website. Enjoy!