Creating A Mobile Application For College Students Via Gamification

Colleges and universities are constantly creating new opportunities and expanding existing ones for students so that they may fully utilize their undergraduate education experience. However, these opportunities are often lost on college students because they are not communicated effectively. For example, most schools just list these opportunities at orientation sessions, soon to be forgotten in a wave of academic preparation, dorm decorating, and last-minute tasks. One promising approach consists of a mobile application (app) that reminds students to take advantage of opportunities, such as visiting the Career Center to find internships and exploring the breadth of online courses. Although this method has potential, such an app would need to be engaging to college students; otherwise, it would see little use. A recent trend in app development is gameification, which is defined as the concept of applying game mechanics and game design techniques to engage and motivate people to achieve their goals. The project utilized gameification to make the app as interesting as possible; it was based off of the popular board game Chutes and Ladders. Additionally, the app was coded using the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s App Inventor 2. By the end of the six-week program, the app, called the Academic Pathway of the College of Charleston, was fully functioning on the Android platform