Gamifying research activity support system

Abstract

Various research activities are carried out every day in research laboratories, including conducting investigations, giving seminars on progress, performing experiments, analyzing results, and writing papers, but all of these activities involve steady, methodical work that does not produce immediate, visible results. For this reason, a mechanism to maintain motivation when research is not going well or to help students get on track with research when they have just been assigned to a laboratory could be useful. Students that have just begun their research may not yet understand how to proceed. In this research, we have developed a research activity concierge (RAC) system, which is a platform to encompass general research activities, and applied gamification to this system to keep motivation high. Furthermore, we investigated the effect of the RAC system on the action setting and motivation and analyzed operational logs to improve usability.