Anne Bowser
Derek Hansen
ABSTRACT
Citizen science projects increasingly incorporate the motivational affordances of games. However, the different user groups that gamified citizen science projects may attract are poorly understood. This project examines how two user groups, nature participants and gamer participants, experience Floracaching, a gamified mobile application for citizen science. Both groups enjoyed Floracaching, and were motivated by discovery, education, and social interaction; both were also motivated by competition, but in different ways. Gamer participants desired guidance while nature participants preferred autonomy. Nature participants saw the inherent value in the app; gamer participants needed to understand how the app could be integrated with their other life activities.
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Digital Library
- Kulkarni, A., Can, M. & Hartmann, B. Collaboratively crowdsourcing workflows with Turkomatic. In Proc. CSCW 2012. New York: ACM Press (2012). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Newman, G., Wiggins, A., Crall, A., Graham, E., Newman, S. and Crowston, K. The future of citizen science: Emerging technologies and shifting paradigms. Front Ecol Environment, 10, 6 (2012), 308--314.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Prestopnik, N. & Crowston, K. Purposeful gaming and socio-computational systems: A citizen science design case. Proc. Group 2012, ACM Press (2012). Google ScholarDigital Library
- Wiggins, A. Free as in puppies: Compensating for ICT constraints in citizen science. Proc. CSCW 2012, ACM Press (2012), 1469--1480. Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- Gamifying citizen science: a study of two user groups
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