StudyCrafter aims to transform research by using game design and crowdsourcing techniques and technologies. Here we explain what this platform can mean for your research.
Rethinking Research
StudyCrafter has been developed in response to a number of challenges that the social and behavioral science face and the opportunities that game design and crowdsourcing technologies and techniques provide.
Engaging Participants
Traditional research often consists of simple tasks without clear goals and uses external motivations to gather participants. By gamifying, we add clear goals that intrinsically motivate participants.
Broadening Participation
With traditional research, the participant pool often consists of students in higher education. Games appeal across ages and cultures. By crowdsourcing, the population can be broadened.
Including Context
Traditional research aims to reduce the number of variables and assumes that abstract tasks are better generalizable. However, often the context of tasks matters and games enable to immerse participants in situations in a believable manner.
Encouraging Replication
With traditional research, researchers often do not pursue replication due to the efforts involved. With StudyCrafter such efforts can be initiated in a few button clicks.
Increasing Complexity
In traditional research, researchers avoid complex research designs that consider multiple variables because of the difficulty of attracting sufficient participants. By crowdsourcing it becomes possible to increase the complexity.
Personalizing Tasks
Traditional research takes a one-size-fits-all approach, which controls for task variability but ignores individual variability in how tasks are engaged with. In the near future, StudyCrafter seeks to help in personalizing research.
Project and Data Accessibility
You have control over who has access to your project and data. You can set both your project and data to private (invite by email only), unlisted (require link to access), or public (everyone can access). However, as per our terms of use, privacy policy, and community guidelines, we require you to publicly share your project and data after completion. Also note that the StudyCrafter Team has access to all online content, whether this is private, unlisted, or public. The team will not remix private or unlisted projects or share/use private or unlisted data without your permission. If you prefer to work on projects in complete privacy, you can use the offline project editor and host projects yourself.
Setting up Your Research
In setting up your research you first have to determine if you want to make use of the entire StudyCrafter platform or want to make use of the offline editor to create a project and then use your own infrastructure for hosting and collecting data. Our Wiki page on the offline editor provides guidance on how to set up StudyCrafter projects yourself. Please note that the StudyCrafter Team is unable to provide any support for projects not hosted on the platform.
To make use of StudyCrafter online, you have to set up an account. With an account, you can start making projects. Once a project is completed, you can set the visibility of your project (default is public) and the resulting data (default is private) and publish it. From there you can promote the project using social media. When you are done, you can change your project status to “complete” and share its data
Setting up a Community Lab
If you have several related projects, are working with others on a similar topic, or want to invite and promote others to join your research topic, you can consider setting up a community lab. With a community lab, you can start building a body of knowledge around a topic and start collaborating on a topic you care about with people you know or with new collaborators.
Need Support?
In these early stages of the platform, we provide limited support to professional researchers in return for feedback. If you are in need of extensive help in developing your project, we can put you in touch with a number of freelancers who are familiar with StudyCrafter. You can contact info@studycrafter for these inquiries.