Today we heard from speakers covering familiar topics such as Citizen Science and Gamification; inside the ExCiteS Research Group we’re very familiar with these. Admittedly, though interesting, I used a bit of this time to pull together the work for the course I’m to develop, compiling instructional information on how to use ArcGIS.com to create a Story Map (which I will present for critique and further develop tomorrow).

My own concerns about Gamification are still out there, and largely unanswered. I’m a HUGE gamer, and though someone may make something with good aims, it doesn’t mean I’m actually going play it. The game needs to be fun, engaging, well designed; and many aspects of those are highly subjective. What’s the perfect formula? I don’t know, but a point one of the speakers touched on earlier is that we may be able to improve successful uptake if an existing technology (with an already established user community) is used.

At the end of the day, we were asked to think about how we may incorporate Citizen Science or Gamification into our activity that we’re designing, which admittedly made me make this face:

I may be able to include it as my way of assessing after the activity, to see if interdisciplinary thinking and uptake of GIS concepts were achieved, but that has yet to be determined. Just because I’m a gamer, doesn’t mean that the other academics I’ll be working with are…