Session Information
| Title | Gaming the Campus |
| Presenter(s) | Stephen Jacobs, Christopher Egert, Michael Soupios and Thomas McGee |
| Time | Saturday, October 20, 11:30a-12:30p |
| Location | Gold A |
| Format | Panel |
| Description | In the past twelve months the Rochester Institute of Technology's School of Interactive Games and Media (IGM) in Rochester, NY and Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey have each deployed pilots of social games that employ badging and achievements to engage their students in new ways across the college campus and academic experience.
IGM's year-long "Just Press Play" was inspired both by the School's examination of the research on student attention and retention and as student's classroom query "Why can't we get achievements just for being awesome?" Seton Hall, inspired by the Macarthur Open Badges project, decided to expand existing points programs on campus by creating "Pirate Patch" a pilot for incoming Freshmen students that began when the students were accepted and ran through campus preview visits and on-campus orientation through their first week of school. Both games were designed so that players would explore their campuses, engage with faculty and staff and have opportunities to build wider social networks amongst their peers. In "Gaming the Campus" members of the design and technical teams from both "Just Press Play" and "Pirate Patch" will discuss the origins and creations of the games, the details of the engines created to run them, the initial research results from the first rounds of deployment and the tweaks to their games based on those results. IGM will report on the results of their relaunch of the "new and improved" "Just Press Play" in September 2012 while Seton Hall will share their plans for moving beyond the pilot phase of "Pirate Patch" as it releases campus-wide in the fall of 2012. Questions throughout the panel are encouraged. |