Imagine that an environmental disaster has caused primitive bacteria to take over everyone’s brain. To save the human race, each person’s brain must be rewired. Don’t panic – it’s just a video game. Welcome to Neuro-Ludus, a game designed by Montreal researchers to test the effectiveness of gamification in IT training. Its dramatic opening scene […]
By Christine Wong — Apr 17 '14
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A lot of the gamification experiments I’ve seen have spent a lot of time figuring out how players earn points, but for the businesses that sign on for such things, there’s often a different, more challenging kind of scorekeeping involved. I imagine for many firms, the success metrics for gamification come down to: “Did this […]
By Shane Schick — Mar 31 '14
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I’m not saying we chose the hotel specifically because there was a free magic show in the evening, but when you’re dealing with three young children and nearing the end of March Break, you’ll do almost anything to make the hours before bedtime disappear. The turnout was better than I expected. At least three dozen […]
By Shane Schick — Mar 17 '14
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Gamification is helping PHD Canada get its groove back. After a three-year winless streak at the Strategy Magazine awards, the marketing and communications agency picked up silver in the 2013 media agency of the year category. PHD was also the only Canadian firm to win gold at the 2013 Internationalist Awards for Innovative Digital Solutions […]
By Christine Wong — Mar 11 '14
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Two weeks ago, when I came across a post called “Gamifying the office? Don’t Bother,” on the Boston Globe’s Ideas blog I started to worry that the backlash against gamification might be justified. In the post, Kevin Hartnett discusses a recent research paper from a pair of Wharton School professors that more or less debunked […]
By Shane Schick — Mar 10 '14
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Hilary Mason is often described as a big data expert, but she also calls herself a hacker, though she insists she’s one of the good ones. The former chief data scientist of URL shortening service Bit.ly and data scientist in residence at Accel Partners is the keynote speaker at this Friday’s CODE 2014 Inspiration Day at the University of Waterloo’s […]
By The CommerceLab — Feb 26 '14
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Before young people decide what to do with the rest of their lives, they might want to play the field a bit first. That’s the basic premise of a PowerPoint presentation created by a social media team at Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC) that recently surfaced on the PostMedia News network. After being roundly […]
By Shane Schick — Feb 24 '14
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The Person: Dr. Jason Nolan, a.k.a. ‘Dr. J’, associate professor at Ryerson University’s School of Early Childhood Studies and director of Ryerson’s Experiential Design and Gaming Environments (EDGE) Lab in Toronto. Nolan is autistic. A high school dropout, he didn’t learn to read properly until his late teens or write properly until his twenties. Following […]
By Christine Wong — Feb 21 '14
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Don Wright is talking about play, but the technology he’s commercializing could change the way we work. Wright is the co-founder of Empatico, a startup based in Stratford, Ont. He is also a graduate of the Master of Digital Experience Innovation program at the University of Waterloo, where he attended the Gamification 2013 coference late last year. […]
By The CommerceLab — Feb 14 '14
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The Person: Dr. Jeremy Friedberg, partner and co-founder at Spongelab Interactive. Friedberg always struggled as a student. But he not only beat the odds, he crushed them by getting a doctorate in molecular genetics and biotechnology. The boy who never did well in school is now helping to revolutionize how kids learn and teachers teach. […]
By Christine Wong — Feb 7 '14
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