Gamifying citizen science: a study of two user groups

Authors:
Anne Bowser;Derek Hansen;Jennifer Preece;Yurong He;Carol Boston;Jen Hammock
Affiliations:
University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA;Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, USA;University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA;University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA;University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA;Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, USA
Venue:
Proceedings of the companion publication of the 17th ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work & social computing
Year:
2014

Citing 4
Cited 0

Collaboratively crowdsourcing workflows with turkomatic

Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work
Purposeful gaming & socio-computational systems: a citizen science design case

Proceedings of the 17th ACM international conference on Supporting group work
Free as in puppies: compensating for ict constraints in citizen science

Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work
Prototyping in PLACE: a scalable approach to developing location-based apps and games

Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

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.