StudyCrafter is a free playful platform where users can create, play, and share research projects to advance our understanding of human behavior together.
It is intended for teaching research and conducting the next generation of social and behavioral science research – and to engage the public at large with scientific research across the world.
It takes a playful approach to science: it inspires users to find creative ways to explore human behavior and enables them to create gamified projects to engage their participants.
Why Gamify Research?
Games have three qualities to help advance scientific research:
Observe
Collect detailed behavioral data automatically and unobtrusively. This eases data collection. It also encourages natural responses.
Situate
Put participants in various contexts, including situations that are difficult to observe in reality. This makes behavior more realistic. It also makes data collection possible.
Engage
Motivate participants to complete tasks voluntarily and with effort. Also, they can play any time and anywhere, thereby broadening participation.
Key Features
- User-friendly editor for creating gamified research projects
- Remix existing projects with a click of a button
- Collect detailed data automatically and anonymously
- Share and retrieve data from projects
- Engage the community to play and discuss your work and results
Project Types
With StudyCrafter you can make the following types of research projects:
Observational study
Observe behavior in a particular situation
Experiment
Randomly assign participants to particular conditions
Game
Observe player behavior in your game
Survey
Collect closed responses
Interview
Collect open responses
Bot Training
Train bots based on human behavior
Ethics and Code of Conduct
When conducting research with human participants it is essential that ethical standards are applied. Because StudyCrafter is an open online community it is also essential that users treat each other with mutual respect.
By participating, users agree to our terms of use, privacy policy, community guidelines, and respect the intellectual property of others. Participation is voluntary at all times and consent to contribute your data is requested at the end of each project. All data collection is anonymous.
Our Research
The StudyCrafter Team and collaborators are researching how people use and learn with StudyCrafter. We also evaluate how its use helps to advance our understanding of human behavior. Based on our research, we make changes to the platform and develop guidelines and best practices – for StudyCrafter and for the social and behavioral sciences at large. See our Research page for more information.
Credits
The platform is developed and maintained by the Northeastern Game Studio at Northeastern University, and has received financial support from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Science Foundation. See the credits for more information about the team behind StudyCrafter.