Browsing by Subject "gamification"
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Item Motivating Senior Native Spanish Speakers learning English through an Educational Game(2021-02-01) Worrest, Michelle; Summers, Kathryn; Walsh, Greg; University of Baltimore. Division of Science, Information Arts, and Technologies; University of Baltimore. Master of Science in Interaction Design and Information ArchitectureMany people believe that the younger you are, the easier it is to learn a second language. This project explores methods for motivating senior native Spanish speakers learning English. Current literature was surveyed with a concentration in language acquisition and literacy, cognition, cultural and motivational factors, and sensory-motor characteristics for older adults. The majority of existing literature focuses on younger populations, so further research into older generations learning English as a foreign language is needed. Moreoever, with regard to basic literacy research, the focus has been on people in their native languages, not English as a second language (Bigelow, & Schwarz, 2010). I sought to test the theory that senior native Spanish speakers would be more motivated to learn English through narrative-based learning as opposed to standard translation learning. I tested both education methods as used in Duolingo, a languagelearning app, on my sample of participants and gauged their satisfaction and motivation rates. I learned that subjects were more satisfied with the narrative-based lessons than the standard translation lessons. Higher satisfaction levels are likely to correlate with the participants likelihood to continue using Duolingo. Repeated and regular involvement in language learning activities has been shown by other researchers to increase retention and may ultimately lead to a higher likelihood of learning English as a second language. Roughly 6% of the U.S. population, or 18.5 million people, are Spanish speakers who assess their English proficiency as inadequate. As the baby boomer generation grows exponentially each year, there is a growing market for second language education geared toward older adults, and current free tools can be optimized for this specific audience.Item Stepcity: a Preliminary Investigation of a Personal Informatics-Based Social Game on Behavior Change(CHI'14 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2014-04) Walsh, Greg; Golbeck, JeniferEncouraging physical activity is an important public health issue. In this study, we set out to see if a game could be used to motivate people to be more active. We recruited 74 subjects to wear Fitbits – a personal activity monitoring device that tracked the number of steps taken in a day – and compared step totals in three experimental conditions: a control, a social interaction experience, and a social game we developed called StepCity. We found that for newer Fitbit users, the game led to users taking more steps than they did in a control condition. In this poster, we present the details of our system and the results of a controlled experiment.