The Goal

We are in the design and planning phase of a new climate change-related citizen science web prototype (related to "UN Sustainable Development Goal 13: Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts"). The prototype will be a mobile-friendly website that allows citizens to take and submit photos and other “ground truth” observations to the Trusted Authorities, during /after floods. This information can be used to help the authorities assess and predict the flood or disaster scope and impact.

We are in the design and planning phase of a new citizen science prototype. In order to make it effective and easy to use, we would like to add gamification (points, badges, levels, social feedback, etc). We would like you to research gamification concepts and systems and then propose a gamification system to suit our application (ex points or badges for safely taking and sharing observations or photos during or after a flood disaster). Your work should be able to showcase:

• An increase in safely completed citizen climate observations
• An increase in citizen usage of the in-app action tracking and reporting
• An increase in citizen contribution to community action projects
• Review and recommend observations from https://scistarter.badgr.com/public/badges/6Jg_IwmfQTaJ2kUNePsO5Q
• Research on both intrinsic motivation (learning, developing skills, interest in environment, and social exchanges resulting in inherent satisfaction and extrinsic motivation (scoreboards and social rewards)
• How to ensure:

- Citizens science volunteers feel that they are valued members of the team

- Citizens science volunteers receive feedback and thanks and feel their work has contributed to help the community deal with the disaster

Your Contribution

Use your skills and creativity in all aspects of the gamification process: research, analysis, iteration, prototyping, presentation and evaluation. We would like you research the various gamification concepts, trends, issues, and solutions that are used in web apps such as FitBit, Facebook, video games, etc...then design a customized gamification system for our citizen science prototype website.

At the start of the project we will provide a walk-through of our prototype site and content. We will also provide a wealth of background material on the application, its use case, goals and objectives, and even detailed low-level fidelity wireframes. and other recommendations behind the proposed citizen science web application features.

We will avail ourselves to meeting with students participating in this study once a week or as necessary to provide guidance and suggested research.