The StudyCrafter Team and collaborators are pursuing various research efforts in and around StudyCrafter with the aim to advance research and education in the social and behavioral sciences.
Gamifying Research
StudyCrafter takes a playful approach to science: it inspires users to find creative ways to explore human behavior and enables them to create gamified projects. We study whether and how this promising approach indeed leads to new, creative ways of performing research and whether it will help to advance science.
First, however, we consider what it means to gamify research – and especially how to do it well. Success or failure is in part a result of methodological rigor and no clear standards or best practices exist for gamifying research. For this effort, we replicate existing research, vary projects and compare outcomes, pursue innovative research to showcase the potential of gamifying research, and evaluate StudyCrafter at large in terms of engagement, study outcomes, and impact.
Gamifying Education
StudyCrafter also takes a playful approach to education. We consider education broadly, but focus especially on higher education. We conjecture that this platform helps remove some of the barriers to conducting research, such as access to participants and the capability to set up experimental scenarios. We conjecture that this platform also makes research more accessible and engaging, thereby educating the next generation of social and behavioral scientists. We study our platform’s impact, but also consider improvements. Towards this, we make incremental changes to the platform and consider the roles that narrative, play, and collaboration have.
Artificial Intelligence Support
The advantage of performing research with and through a computer is that it can assist you. In our work we explore – in a critical manner – how Artificial Intelligence (AI) can assist with participating and creating research projects. In particular, we consider how personalizing the use of StudyCrafter impacts both the user experience and the study outcomes. For this effort, we plan to study various user profiling and modeling approaches. We also seek to explore how users and computers can work together. In this scenario, the AI would be used to provide suggestions, point out or correct issues, and automate certain steps.
Join Us!
We welcome others who want to join us on this scientific journey – whether in close collaboration or in an advisory capacity. You can contact us at info@studycrafter.
Publications
- Harteveld, C., & Sutherland, S.C. (2017). Personalized gaming for motivating social and behavioral science participation. In Proceedings of Humanize’17. New York, NY: ACM Press.
- Harteveld, C., Manning, N., Abu-Arja, F., Menasce, R., Thurston, D., Smith, G., & Sutherland, S.C. (2017). Design of playful authoring tools for social and behavioral science. In Extended Abstracts of the International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces. New York, NY: ACM Press.
- Harteveld, C., Sutherland, S.C., Stahl, A.J., Smith, G., & Talgar, G. (2016). Standing on the shoulders of citizens: Exploring gameful collaboration for creating social experiments. In Proceedings of the 49th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), Kauai, Hawaii.
- Harteveld, C., Sutherland, S.C., & Folajimi, Y. (2016). Sustainable life cycle game design: Mixing games and reality to transform education. In Proceedings of Joint Conference of Digital Games Research Association and Foundations of Digital Games.
- Harteveld, C., Sutherland, S.C., & Smith, G.M. (2015). Design considerations for creating game-based social experiments. Paper presented at the 2015 ACM Conference on Computer-Human Interaction (ACM CHI 2015) Workshop, Researching Gamification: Strategies, Opportunities, Challenges, Ethics, Seoul, South Korea.
- Sutherland, S.C., Harteveld, C., Smith, G., Schwartz, J., & Talgar, C. (2015). Exploring digital games as a research and educational platform for replicating experiments. In Northeast Decision Sciences Institute (NEDSI) Conference, Boston, MA