Campus Explorer

Abstract

University students are often highly focused on their current lectures and imminent exams and thus miss out on interacting with students across departments and engaging in campus life.

To facilitate a more closely knit community of university students, we present Campus Explorer, a prototype mobile game aimed at gamifying campus life. Campus Explorer allows for evaluating a set of suitable core game mechanics, social features and reward systems to motivate students to explore their university and meet other students. The prototype implements a location-based approach and includes game mechanics such as building check-ins, setting up meetings, campus expeditions, events, and more. Each of these features is implemented as a point of interest displayed on a map. A point of interest can be accessed by the players when they are physically close to a predefined location and can eventually be checked into after solving a task. The task required can be varied, which allows for testing different mechanics based on a common location-based core mechanic.

In this thesis, we present our basic point of interest framework and the implementation of different mechanics built on top of it. We evaluate the potential of our approach using both qualitative and quantitative data collected during an initial playtesting phase.