Working with Young People - Gamification and Competitions

Authors: Sara Berge Lorenzen, Cathrine Marie Skovbo Winther,Aina Landsverk Hagen, Julie Ridley

Handbook of Youth Social Citizen Science (Borgström, D., Canto-Farachala, P., Hagen, A. L., Norvoll, R., Rådmark, L. & Lorenzen, S.B. (Eds.). (2024). Handbook of Youth Citizen Social Science. Working with Young People and the Local Community for Social Change. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10566411)

Incorporating gamification elements and competitions can be an effective strategy for making the research more fun and engaging. In Norway, the research team introduced a data collection competition, where young citizen scientists competed to conduct the most interviews with local youth. This competitive approach was highly popular, leading to the incorporation of competitive elements into most meetings and research activities. In Denmark, to foster discussions about sustainable innovation, they organised a rally where the young citizen scientists competed to propose as many ideas as possible. They also designed a game to assist the involved youth in further developing their ideas. In Sweden, responses from a co-created questionnaire were transformed into cards, making the analysis of data into a card game.