The National Youth Leadership Council (NYLC), in conjunction with the Generator School Network (GSN), has been leading the way in providing students and teachers high quality, dynamic service learning opportunities and support for over 30 years. The Generator School Network is an online community of more than 5,000 students and teachers with an interest in sharing their service-learning experiences with others.
Driving Site Usage with Gamification
The NYLC came to Internet Exposure with an interesting goal—to encourage users to engage more with their existing service learning tools by incorporating badges as incentives, creating an interactive gaming platform. The idea was to create a new and interesting system of badges to entice users to incrementally continue to work through and complete sections of their existing service learning projects online—earning fun rewards along the way. The goal was to gain more complete, higher quality service learning projects posted to their site and more valuable content for their entire user base through this gaming application.
Education, Gaming, and Technology Unite
The team at NYLC and iExposure took inspiration from several different sources in order to come up with a gamification design that was easy and fun to use. The website had to be designed with potentially tech-challenged users in mind on the front end, yet full featured enough on the back end to allow the NYLC team to update their site well into the future. NYLC came to the table with their existing online tools, extensive knowledge of service learning education requirements, and an interest in Mozilla Open Badges. iExposure offered a wide range of experience with different types of game design, extensive experience with custom content management, and experience designing a variety of user friendly applications. In the end, the combined areas of expertise made for a perfect combination.
Completely Customizable Content
Internet Exposure designed and implemented a system of over 35 badges which coincided with a variety of different activities on the site. We also designed a tool to allow site admins to manually create and add new badges in the future. A badge leaderboard was designed and created for the homepage to showcase the most recent and top badge earners in hopes to snag the interest of non-members or inactive members to participate. iE also created a fully editable quiz module tool allowing admins to create open-ended or multiple choice questions which walk students through filling out their service learning projects more completely, generating higher quality content.
5,000+
NYLC
Members Online
888
Service Learning
Projects Created
1,200+
Hours of Planning
and Development