How to Save the World with Gamification, Behavior & Data Viz

Transcript

Welcome to my online course.

Save the World with Gamification:

"How to Apply Game Mechanics toSocial and Environmental Causes for the Epic Win".

Thank you so much for joining me. I'm really excited to dive in for what we're going to learn today.

I want to start with this crucial topic and something that's very dear to my heart, which is that creativity is the only limiting factor in saving the world and that knowledge is an ingredient in creativity.

We often think that creativity is this kind of nebulous God-given gift that doesn't really have a structure.

But really the more things that we know, the more creative we can be - and there is a direct relationship between knowledge and creativity.

The more knowledge and skills you have the more creative you can be - and this is something that's really exciting:

The virtuous cycle of creativity

You have your own special genius zone. The one thing that you are really good at and no one else in the world is quite as good as you are, at this one special thing,

and I think when we are all in a genius zone, our higher purpose is to have a positive impact on the world.

But in order to be really good at doing good things in the world,we need to learn tools and knowledge.

If you think of even a painter,a pianist ,a photographer or a computer programmer these might be creative fields but they also require huge amounts of technical training to master.

When we have learned the tools and the knowledge,like what we're going to go through in this course today, then that will enhance our creativity and innovation.

When we're able to become enormously creative then we'll be able to make measurable change in the world.

Measurement really is the cornerstone of what this course is all about and then this virtual cycle of creativity goes around and around.

And what we're going to learn in this course is the tools and the knowledge for your virtuous cycle of creativity to truly flower.

I want to take a quick moment to share what I think my special genius zone is and what I'm going to share with you today.

All throughout my twenty years in the environmental industry,I've been able to turn the pessimism,overwhelming, frustration about the world's problems into massive optimism, creativity and inspiration.

If this course is successful, you shouldn't ever again feel these terrible emotions associated with the bad things that are going on in the world and you should be equipped with the tools to feel this epic optimism and creativity to solve the world's problems.

This is what you'll get from this course:

• You'll turn any negative a frustrated emotions you have about the world's problems into massive inspiration.
• You'll generate many new awesome ideas about how to create real change for your cause using gamification.
• You create a full set of gamification designs. This will be either user interaction design for your app or you can make low tech pen and paper versions too.
• I want you to implement these ideas in real life in your organization.
• Ultimately,this process will take you closer to your special genius zone.

We'll be learning fifteen gamification techniques in this course starting with:

1. Data
2. Behavior change
3. Disclosure
4. Comparison
5. Leaderboards
6. Color grading
7. Star ratings
8. Heat maps
9. Progress bars
10. Star charts
11. Feedback loops
12. Digital screens
13. Badges
14. Awards
15. Avatars

In each of these chapters,We will also be learning about various case studies and academic reports that show that they really do work.

Gamification is part of the eight step in a larger course that I teach called "How to Save the World" where we go from data to goal setting to visualization, ideas storms, idea evaluation, policy, behavior change and then the eighth step is game design which is where this gamification course fits in. And then we follow into tribes and social change marketing and then technology.

Gamification techniques in themselves are easy and powerful to implement but if you ever want to learn the full suite the full design strategy for change,you can check out this larger "How to Save the World" course.

Well, I think that saving the world is the greatest game on earth!

So, Let's Make it Happen!

Transcript

Welcome to my online course.

Save the World with Gamification:

"How to Apply Game Mechanics toSocial and Environmental Causes for the Epic Win".

Thank you so much for joining me. I'm really excited to dive in for what we're going to learn today.

I want to start with this crucial topic and something that's very dear to my heart, which is that creativity is the only limiting factor in saving the world and that knowledge is an ingredient in creativity.

We often think that creativity is this kind of nebulous God-given gift that doesn't really have a structure.

But really the more things that we know, the more creative we can be - and there is a direct relationship between knowledge and creativity.

The more knowledge and skills you have the more creative you can be - and this is something that's really exciting:

The virtuous cycle of creativity

You have your own special genius zone. The one thing that you are really good at and no one else in the world is quite as good as you are, at this one special thing,

and I think when we are all in a genius zone, our higher purpose is to have a positive impact on the world.

But in order to be really good at doing good things in the world,we need to learn tools and knowledge.

If you think of even a painter,a pianist ,a photographer or a computer programmer these might be creative fields but they also require huge amounts of technical training to master.

When we have learned the tools and the knowledge,like what we're going to go through in this course today, then that will enhance our creativity and innovation.

When we're able to become enormously creative then we'll be able to make measurable change in the world.

Measurement really is the cornerstone of what this course is all about and then this virtual cycle of creativity goes around and around.

And what we're going to learn in this course is the tools and the knowledge for your virtuous cycle of creativity to truly flower.

I want to take a quick moment to share what I think my special genius zone is and what I'm going to share with you today.

All throughout my twenty years in the environmental industry,I've been able to turn the pessimism,overwhelming, frustration about the world's problems into massive optimism, creativity and inspiration.

If this course is successful, you shouldn't ever again feel these terrible emotions associated with the bad things that are going on in the world and you should be equipped with the tools to feel this epic optimism and creativity to solve the world's problems.

This is what you'll get from this course:

• You'll turn any negative a frustrated emotions you have about the world's problems into massive inspiration.
• You'll generate many new awesome ideas about how to create real change for your cause using gamification.
• You create a full set of gamification designs. This will be either user interaction design for your app or you can make low tech pen and paper versions too.
• I want you to implement these ideas in real life in your organization.
• Ultimately,this process will take you closer to your special genius zone.

We'll be learning fifteen gamification techniques in this course starting with:

1. Data
2. Behavior change
3. Disclosure
4. Comparison
5. Leaderboards
6. Color grading
7. Star ratings
8. Heat maps
9. Progress bars
10. Star charts
11. Feedback loops
12. Digital screens
13. Badges
14. Awards
15. Avatars

In each of these chapters,We will also be learning about various case studies and academic reports that show that they really do work.

Gamification is part of the eight step in a larger course that I teach called "How to Save the World" where we go from data to goal setting to visualization, ideas storms, idea evaluation, policy, behavior change and then the eighth step is game design which is where this gamification course fits in. And then we follow into tribes and social change marketing and then technology.

Gamification techniques in themselves are easy and powerful to implement but if you ever want to learn the full suite the full design strategy for change,you can check out this larger "How to Save the World" course.

Well, I think that saving the world is the greatest game on earth!

So, Let's Make it Happen!

Behavior Change

Why Gamification?

The gamification techniques we are about to learn, create change because they tap into the motivational core of our being.

These techniques have been proven to achieve remarkably powerful change. Gamification techniques can be easily implemented as low hanging fruit.Using either high tech or lower tech approaches and that will help solve this problem that every single campaign that's tried to change the world before you has come up against.

It's natural to assume that the only way to achieve environmental change is by things like charging money for pollution or making it illegal.

Alternatively we can assume that it takes educational or emotionally compelling materials to motivate people to change.

However, evidence suggests that education and emotional concern produce a poor, if not indeterminable effect on environmental change.

Don't forget when we're trying to change the world, we're trying to change behavior not commerce - and this makes our world a bit different to the normal supply and demand industries.

We’re trying to do something like getting people to use a reusable cup when they order coffee, or trying to change a law or to change a whole city.

We're not just getting people to buy a thing, which is an important distinction to make.

All of these problems can be broken down into two halves of measurement and behavior.

We can view all of our problems through the lens of measurement in that every problem in the world, from trees to human rights abuses, is ultimately measurable - and we need to know the data on these problems in order to solve them.

All of the solutions to these problems can be seen through the lens of human behavior.

That means anything that we want to change or effect in the world requires humans to do a thing, so we need to understand the principles of human psychology and behavioral science in order to produce the messages that are really going to move people to change what they do.

We can put these three domains of knowledge together which I called "the magic trifecta of change".

We start with the data and measurement about what it is we want to change in the world. Then we figure out what behavior changes we need people to do in order to effect that measurement. And then ehird part of the trifecta is game design, where we add gamification and game design principles to the behaviors to the data in order to really produce this magical trifecta that really creates a powerful change.

We can put a strategy together in what I call the "Russian Doll Strategy for Change".

At the very center of our Russian dolls, the little tiny one right in the middle represents data and measurement.

This is the core of our strategy-the very center.

Everything we do, has to lead to change in the data of our cause.

Then once we really, really understand what we are trying to change in terms of the numbers, then we can wrap this with a behavioral change strategy like the second old that goes around a little doll in the middle. Once we've isolated the most powerful behavior, that is going to affect the data, then we can wrap these behaviors with gamification strategies like we're going to learn today.

The best way to understand gamification is a “motivational wrapping” or an way to enhance human motivation for change.

So it works really perfectly as a third Russian doll to wrap your behavior change strategy. Once you've got your first three Russian doll set up, then you can start looking at marketing education and outreach programs (they’re like documentaries, festivals, events, conferences, Youtube videos, blog articles) that kind of thing.

Now, a lot of people and organizations like to produce educational and outreach material, but your marketing and outreach needs to support some gamification principles that support a behavior change that support an actual change in the data of your cause.

Once you have all of these Russian dolls set up, then you can start looking into technology.

Do you need an app?Do you need a database? Do you need a type of custom made screen? What is your whole internet marketing campaign?

Then you use the technology to get more people involved in the marketing and the education, that then pulls them into the gamification design, that pulls them into the behavior change, and then creates the ultimate change in the numbers. 

But the easiest way to think of the magic trifecta of change is these three dolls.

We need data, wrapped by behavior change, and behavior change is wrapped by gamification techniques.

Let's dive in and let the gamification mechanics begin!

Transcript

Gamification Technique#1: Data.

Your gamification strategy must revolve around the measurement of real world numbers.

Here are examples of measurable data you might look at:

• Carbon dioxide emissions
• Water pollution
• Beef consumption
• The numbers around happiness
• Gallons of gasoline you use
• Or you might look at the numbers around how many animals' lives saved
• Air Pollution data
• How much people are exercising
• You could look at pesticide use
• Waste generated
• All the number of trees saved
• The number of fish in the sea
• Data around childhood obesity
• The amount of time you can save
• The tons of landfill we make
• The amount of chemicals going into the air
• Or urban runoff

There is no limit to the data sets out there that we can measure and develop at change strategy around.

Here’s an example tutorial based on the homework for Chapter One.

First Step,decide what you want to change in real world numbers and try to identify a location too.

For this example,we are going to measure the amount of waste going to landfill in pounds or kilograms in the California Bay Area.

So this number is completely tangible and measurable in real world data.

We're not trying to measure anything fluffy like awareness, publicity, or Facebook clicks.

Second step,research the data sources where your data is collected and stored.

Here's a map of the San Francisco Bay Area.

We can see that there are nine different counties in this area.

A little bit of Google searching put me on to this PDF report called “The stats of disposal in California” and it is produced by an organization called CalRecycle, which appears to be the main organization in California that gathers the data on waste.

Step number three, we need to decide what numbers represent your cause’s as current status - I can look through the report and without too much effort. I can find out that the California average is 4.7 lbs of trash per resident per day.

So now we know where we're starting from in terms of the numbers - and with a little bit more research on the CalRecycle website, I can find the amount of waste generated for each county in the Bay Area.

I've listed all of the nine counties on this table here and the total amount of waste in tons in the column on the right.

Step number four is critically important for gamification design. It's to decide what numbers represent your cause’s success.

This is where we're going to go.

This is our Goal!

This numerical goal might seem pretty obvious at first but you would be surprised how few environmental NGOs and groups of people really have this goal in mind.

So we know where we currently are which is four point seven pounds of trash, and where we're going, which is zero pounds per resident per day.

Just at the beginning we're starting at four point seven and our goal is to get to zero.

OK,homework time!

Now this is really fun!

• Decide what you want to change in real world numbers and also identify your location.
• Then research the data sources where your data is collected and stored.
• Decide what numbers represent your cause’s current status - that is where is everything at right now
• and then decide what numbers represent your cause success: where do you ultimately want to get to?

You should be able to achieve this with a bit of googling maybe some phone calls as well.

It's a super interesting process starting to get into the numbers and this step is the mattress, it is the soil, where all the rest of the gamification techniques that we're going to learn through the rest of the course depends on this one step.

So don't shortchange this step!

Go out now and start doing some research and post your homework in the Facebook group with the hashtag #data.

I'm really looking forward to hearing from you and really looking forward to seeing what it is you're trying to change in the world, and I will see you in the next video.

Transcript

Gamification Technique #2: Behavior Change

All gamification must support a clearly identified behavior or task.

Behaviors need to be unique and de-clustered into their more specific variations, and I'll explain what I mean by de-clustering right now.

You need to isolate the behavior.

A mistake that's often made in campaigns is that an organization or person will try and tell you to do an enormous number of actions that are all clustered together.

It might be something like “go vegan” or “cut down electricity”.

Now what you need to do with your behavior is to isolate the behavior.

The first step is that you have an actor. This is the person you're trying to change. It could be an ordinary person. It could be a corporate executive. It could be a judge or politician, or it could be your workmates or schoolmates.

Then you need to get this one person to do an action. The action could be composting more, riding a bike more, using plastic less, signing a bill, signing a petition, making a donation, but there is one person engaging in one specific action.

And you need to know exactly what the measurable result is for this action. If you're asking the person to cut down on plastic or to compost more, or to ride their bike, you need to know exactly, in numbers of real world matter, what the result is going to be.

Then once you've isolated your actors and their behaviors and what the numerical impact on the cause is going to be, then you can go through the process of de-clustering.

Now the example,we’re using in this course is one about zero waste.

One of the most important things that people can do to move towards zero waste is to start composting more.

On first glance, it might seem like asking people to compost more is just one particular behavior. But when we look into it and we try to de-cluster it, we can see that composting actually consists of many different behaviors.

These behaviors might be:

• composting at home
• composting at work
• composting at the mall
• composting when you're out on the street
• composting at a cafe

You can compost if you live in a house that has a garden, which is quite different if you're composting in a small space in an apartment.

There are probably even more versions of composting that this. But as you can see, just at first glance we've already turned composting into six different sub categories, through the de-clustering process.

And the reason why we have to do this, is that each specific behavior needs its own kind of strategy.

As you can see, trying to get cafes to compost is probably a really different process to trying to get people who live in small apartments to compost.

We're working with different people, a different scenario, and a different type of business.

Let's get into the example zero waste tutorial.

Number one,make a list of the behaviors that your audience will need to adopt so that they can reach your goal from technique number one.

So, the way I got started with this was I found a report called “The 2011 Facts and Figures on Waste” produced by the EPA. Now this report has loads of data tables, so I was able to look into the data tables and be able to see what municipal solid waste (which is household waste) is made up of.

It's made up of a whole lot of things, and what I would think off the top of my head might be good to help people go zero waste, is actually not what's true at all when you actually start looking into the numbers.

So by looking into this data report, I could come up with these type of behavior that I think we should get people in businesses to do to go zero waste.

Getting people to compost food and garden waste.This two account most to those that goes into the landfills.

Three,stopping people to buy plastic bottles.

Four,donating to thrift stores.

Textiles and clothing actually make up the fourth highest portion in landfill, which I would have never of thought of if I didn't look at the numbers.

and of course,better recycling sorting.

So by looking at the numbers, I've been able to identify these five techniques that I can then develop my change campaign from.

Step two, we need to decluster the behavior to the simplest behavior possible until there are no variations on the behavior (and you can always add variations on the behavior as branches).

Create a map like this of the declustering of behaviors.

The next step is, we need to quantify at what scale your target behaviors will affect the data you are trying to change.

I've added a rough sketch of how much waste can be avoided in numbers through each of these declustered behaviors.

You’ll see I've got:

• composting at a cafe at 0.3 lbs
• composting on the street at 0.5 lbs
• composting at the mall at 0.2 lbs
• composting at work at 1.2 lbs
• composting with an apartment at 0.7 lbs
• composting at a garden at 1.3 lbs

So, by looking at this I can see which sub-behavior we can work on to make the most impact.

And looking at our campaign of something that we can easily focus on, we decide to choose “composting at work” at 1.2 lbs.

And the fourth step is, what we need to do is draw a diagram of the behavior (or behaviors) that you'll play it will do including the actor,the action and the measurable result.

So here we've got a person at work and then the person needs to go and put the food scrap in the green bin.

Then when they do this, they will reduce landfill waste by 1.2 lbs per day.

By making this little graphic, you'll be able to design exactly what it is you want people to do - and with your campaign you'll be able to be extremely specific about what resources you use in your messaging and how you are really going to create measurable change.

Now to summarize, here is your behavior homework:

1. Make a list of the behaviors that your audience will need to adopt so that they reach your goal from technique one.
2. Decluster the behavior into the simplest behavior possible until there are a no variations on the behavior (You can add variations on the behavior as branches).
3. If possible, quantify at what scale and your target behaviors will affect the data you are trying to change. You need to make sure that you put a number on each behavior
4. Then the last step. is to draw a diagram of the behavior or behaviors that your player will do including the actor, action and measurable result,

If you have several that you will plan a will do including the act of the action and the measurable result.

Post your homework to the Facebook group with the hashtag #behavior.

I am really looking forward to seeing your diagram and your target behaviors and your measurable result.

I hope you enjoyed this chapter and I will see you in the next section.

Transcript

Gamification Technique #3: Disclosure.

Now this is by far my most favorite chapter.

Disclosure is absolutely at the core of all great gamification design - and it's a crucial principle to understand in social change.

Disclosing data, otherwise known as “targeted transparency” or “smart disclosure”, can create dramatic change.

Disclosure is simply the process of making data about a cause publicly visible.

One of the most exciting case studies about disclosure is the Toxic Release Inventory (TRI). Simply requiring businesses to disclose the toxic chemical usage to the EPA spurred a 45% reduction in toxic releases throughout the United States.

Now, 45% is a huge number when it comes to changing anything at all and this number only happened because the EPA asked businesses in America to just let them know what toxic chemicals they were using.

This is such a powerful example that we can draw on for any of a social change campaign.

This quite came from the Annual Review of Economics from the University of Chicago,

“The surprising fact is that without mandating any behavioral change, this law (Toxic Release Inventory) has had massive beneficial effects, spurring large reductions in toxic releases throughout the United States." This unanticipated consequence suggests that all by themselves, disclosure requirements might be able to produce significant emissions reductions.

###p

A review of energy monitoring devices placed in households suggest that such programs can induce a 7% reduction among active uses.

Now, 7% isn't quite as dramatic as a first example is 45%, but if you've ever really tried to make change in the world across a large amount of people, 7% is actually a really big number to achieve.

Our third case study about disclosure is the Carbon Disclosure Project.

The Carbon Disclosure Project helped over three thousand seven hundred companies disclose information about carbon emissions. Since it started, Fortune 500 companies have reduced their carbon intensity by 2% per year.

Our final case study is Restaurant Hygiene Grade Cards. These are cards that give restaurants an A, B,or C. like you can see in the image.

Hygiene grade cards placed in Los Angeles restaurant windows caused health inspection scores to improve and hospitalizations for food borne illnesses to decrease by huge 20%. Another big number just by adding this simple disclosure principles to restaurants.

Let's go into out zero waste example tutorial.

Our first step is to simply make a poster with the key data you want to disclose and to put it up near your desk.

At this point, you are only the disclosing the information to yourself. But as you are the designer of the campaign, this data will motivate you to start to change.

I made this really simple one up just with a pen and paper that says “Californians make four point seven pounds of trash per day”, and then I stuck it on the wall, as you can see in the image on the right.

So I can see that at my desk every day.

Step Two,if you want to make your data into at chart or graph, I found the data about municipal solid waste from the website that I found at CalRecycle and then I found all of the information in this table on the left and I made a little chart in Excel of the amount of waste that Californians make per day.

Now, I have this data out in the open we can see it we can connect to it.

This data just in itself inspires us to change.

Step three, is to put these numbers on your organizations website in a way that is easy to access.

A good example of this is the website eia.gov - the U.S. Energy Information Administration and you can see they have put a chart right there on the home page.

The chart shows the amount of crude oil imports to the USA.

1. Make a post just the way I did with the key data you want to disclose and put it up near your desk.
2. Then put these numbers on your organization’s website in a way that is easy to access, like we saw on the ###a href="http://eig.gov/">eia.gov website
3. Make your data into a chart or graph.

Please do post your homework to the Facebook group with the hashtag #disclosure.

I am really looking forward to hearing from you and seeing what insights you've had into your cause since looking so deeply into the data.

Please post an image of the poster that you make for your wall and your chart.

I really can't wait to see it and I will see you in the next chapter!

Transcript

Gamification Technique #4: Comparison

Data gives us the power to rank people,places and organizations by performance.These comparisons allow us to leverage our quest for social prestige and our desire to avoid the shame of low score.

Here is a simple example on how we can compare people.

Be aware of the first, second or third or fourth or fifth style of ranking that we use in sports.

And we use this to inspire people to change for just about any particular type of thing.

Here is another comparison example, you can get the data for amount of water that you use when you shower and say it looks this big using some kind of graphic like this bowl with the fish and you can compare with how much other people use when they shower and use a comparison type of graphic to visually show the differences.

This is a great simple example of comparison that you can use.

And again, it comes back to knowing the data- the numbers behind what you are trying to change.

This is another simple visual design,that you can use to compare different types of impact.

So you have,one bubble representing your audience- the person you want to change.

Comparisons- some a little bit higher, some a little bit lower so they can have the feel of the scale and you can use it to inspire they sense of healthy social competition and social norms.

A good example of the data you can compare was the amount of energy one person living in a single person dwelling uses, which is quite a lot.

Then the next bubble can represent, how much energy two people use living in one home.

Then,three people in one home is even less.

And then four people living together in one home.

Presenting that information in a diagram like this can clearly indicate that living as a one person in one home, like one person in a one bedroom apartment is one of the worst thing that you can do for your carbon footprint.

You might want to represent the amount of pesticide used in different apple crops to different location around the country.

You can show apples from place A, uses this many parts per million pesticide.

Apples from place B uses this much.and apples from place C uses this much.

Case study: Comparing Houses by Electricity Use

The company Opower puts a chart on electricity bills that ranks residents against their neighbors. This achieves 3% average reduction in electricity usage.

First, you might think 3% is not that high but considering how simple the intervention is,3% is a great win just by adding this simple chart to an electricity bill.

Here is an example of Opower electricity bill.

You can see the middle bar, the gray one that is YOU and how much energy you use.

And a little bit less is your more energy efficient neighbors.

And you can see all the other neighbors who are using a little bit more than you in the orange bar.

You can see in the right, that this person has gotten a good score. They've gotten one smiley face. But they can still do better, get a double smiley face if they can be as energy efficient as their neighbor shown in the green bar.

Another case study is the project called Oklahoma City goes on a diet.

The mayor of Oklahoma City challenged his city to lose a collective one million pounds after being ranked America's Fattest City by Men's Health.More that 47,000 citizens tracked their weight.Five years later, the city reached its goal of losing collectively 1 million pounds.

Now. this is a really fun case study in itself. But what particularly is interesting about it is what motivated the change was the ranked of the top 5 fattest cities in America, which was the title of the piece put out by the mayor in.

It was being ranked.

It was taking the actual numbers, putting them in order and there is this disclosure of the information motivating the mayor to bring on this campaign.

And what is also interesting about this project is that they managed to get through and increase 1% tax on the whole city to fund urban greening, health and exercise programs which apparently went through largely and combat. Because the city was so motivated to get behind this campaign. Because nobody wanted to be known as America's fattest city.

And we can use the power of comparison, for all types of civic techs and civil innovations to compare cities against each other and hopefully create this kind of momentum.

So,let's dive in our zero waste example tutorial .

Step one is to decide who your players will be. They could be individual people, businesses, departments,cities,suburbs,states,streets,colleges,houses,dorms,or corporations.

In our case studies today,we are using counties in the Bay Area.

So I have 9 players in this example which is:

• Mirin
• Sonoma
• Napa
• Solani]o
• Contra Costa
• Almeda
• Santa Clara
• San Mateo
• San Francisco

That you can see on the map on the right.

The next step is, to create a spreadsheet with your players in one column, and their performance data in one column.

As you can see, I've listed all of my 9 players,we have the data in our earlier example of how much waste their producing in tonnes per year.Then in the third column,I have population and then it is very easy for me to calculate the amount of waste per capita in pounds per year in the pink column on the right.

Then, all we have to do is rank our players from best to worst.

Now, this table looks quite similar to the last one, except now it is ranked.

What we can see is that Napa county produces 1616 lbs/yr which was the highest of all of the Bay Area counties.And the we can look down and see San Francisco is doing the best.Only producing 1021 lbs of trash per year.

Now, we have a clear table,indicating the direct comparisons of every county against the other.And we can use this comparisons now in our gamification design.

Then, all we have to do is add a position on the blue column in the left we can set it to first,second,third,fourth,fifth,sixth,seventh,eight,and nineth place to each single county.

Step four, is to make a diagram showing the three best players in first,second and third place.This is a very common practice you probably seen in sports especially in Olympics.

So in first place,you see San Francisco coming in at 1021 lbs of waste per capita per year.In second place, we have Contra Costa county coming in 1174 pounds of waste per capita per year.In third place,comes in Santa Clara coming in at 1220 lbs of waste per capita per year.

This kind of graphical way of showing information create a powerful cycle of logical effect on the player.

Step five,pick a target player.

Make a poster for them showing who is above them and who is below them.

This design, I have done here is inspired by the Opower report that we saw earlier.

I have picked Sonoma county, coming in at fifth place as an example.Then I've shown the one county in the position above them and the another county that was in the position below them.As you can see in fourth place there is Marin and in sixth place there is Alameda. And we can see our target county,Sonoma county at fifth place in the middle.

And it is designed as a simple card or a letter that would say:

Hi Sonoma County!

You are currently in 5th place out of the nine Bay Area counties in your race to get to zero waste.

And drawing from the Opower example from earlier,a simple graphic like this should inspire even further change from the counties

HERE IS YOUR COMPARISON HOMEWORK SUMMARIZED!

1. Decide on who your "players" will be.They can be individual people or businesses,departments,cities,suburbs,states,streets,colleges,houses,dorms, or corporations.
2. Create a spreadsheet with your players in one column and their performance data in the next column.
3. Rank your players from best to worst.
4. Make a diagram showing the three best players in first,second and third place mush like the type of placement you'd see in sporting events or the Olympics.
5. Pick a target player then make a poster for them showing whose above them and whose below them.

Then post your homework in the facebook group with the hashtag #comparison.

I really looking forward to what you come up with and what creative ways that you could can compare your different players.

And, I will see you in the next Chapter!

Transcript

Gamification Technique #5: Leaderboards

Leaderboards are a public display of position.

They rank players from highest to lowest based on their score. A leaderboard exists entirely to leverage the power of social competition.

Here's an example of a leaderboard.

You can see the top three players up the very top in the first second and third place and then you can see the other players ranked from best to worst showing their score and a progress bar.

Now, leaderboards are just so simple to make and they can have a profound impact.

Here's another type of leaderboard for a Smart Phone design.

You can see the player is ranked from best to worst and then their score next to their name.

Here's another design for a web application.

If you're wondering if they work, here is a case study for learning with a leaderboard.

A leaderboard added to an online learning experiment found that students given leaderboards interacted with their project an average of thirty times more often than the others .

Now, thirty times is a dramatic improvement in behavior, caused by a simple leaderboard.

Now let's dive into our zero waste example tutorial.

Now this is going to be fairly similar to our social comparison example from the previous chapter.

So, first we need to make a spreadsheet of old your players with their current score and rank from best to worst.

So we have this already have nine counties, all ranked from the least waste they produce to the most.

Step two, is we add a column for place for each player. That means we assign first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth place like we did in the chapter before.

Step three, is to find a leaderboard design on a website like iStockPhoto.com or you can design one yourself using canva.com or contract a graphic designer to create one for you.

I mocked up the simple leaderboard in a web application called Canva.com which you should totally check out if you haven't tried it already.

As you can see, I've titled it "The Bay Area Race to Zero" - I've put the numerical destination in the title, so we all know what it's about.

And then in the green dots on the left column, I've got it all about places from one to nine.

Step four, is to add your players to your leaderboard design.

So now, from my spreadsheet. I've added all of our counties from first place to ninth place on our leader board and now we have this beautifully designed piece of information that we can share with the counties and the local communities to use to inspire change.

Step five, is I want you to distribute your leaderboard to your players. So once you have your design, you can just print it off and send it in the mail or you can email it.

This is something that's really easy to do with free graphic design tools and even if it's only digital, it should create an impact.

If you want to do a high tech leaderboard, you can design it into your web application you can create a leader board on your application using your actual players real data.

You'll need to store the data in a database like MySQL or MongoDB and present it using a graphical CSS front end.

And if you want an easy low tech leaderboard, you can create your leaderboard in a graphics program or even just in a simple spreadsheet and print it out you can distribute it by e-mail on social media or just give out physical copies.

You can make your leaderboard into a walll poster and you can easily put a graphic of your leader board on your organizations website.

Now this is your leaderboard homework:

1. Make a list or a spreadsheet of all your players with their current school and rank from best to worst.
2. Add a column for place for each player. For example, first second and third place.
3. Find a leader board design on iStockPhoto.com or design one yourself using canva.com or contract a graphic designer to create one for you
4. Add your players and the data to a leader board design and then get it out there to everyone to see.
5. Distribute your leaderboard to your players.

Now this homework might seem like a simple task, but for many environmental and social change indicators, this has not been done.

You could be the first one in your industry to put this information together and send it out, which could have a really powerful effect.

I am really looking forward to seeing you leaderboards and to seeing a data on there, so please do post your homework in the Facebook group with the hashtag #leaderboards - and of course, you can ask me any questions in the Facebook group as you go on.

And I will see you in the next chapter!

Transcript

Thank you so much for being a part of this course and watching this far.

It is feedback time!

I would love to hear your thoughts about the course.

So please don't hesitate to let me know so I can make the course even better for the students that come after you.

Have all the slides and concepts in easy to understand?

Have you been confused about anything?

What can I do to make this course better?

Post you all thoughts and ideas with the hashtag #feedback in the Facebook group or you can email me at kp@helloworlde.com.

I would love to hear from you.

Transcript

Gamification Technique #6 : Color Grading

The psychological effect of color is dramatically underrepresented. We can communicate so much with color and what's so great about it is that it doesn't require the brain to do any cognition.

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Color grading assigns a color spectrum to a range of data points. Colors can be assigned to indicate good and bad performance to your audience - it is simple.

Here are some color grading examples:

On the left you can see a simple dial type of color grading like you would see on a dashboard or you see in a fire warnings. It's really easy.

Red what indicates poor.

Yellow kind of in the middle.

and green indicates good.

You can also use simple dots.

I've got some dots here in red, orange and yellow - and you can assign these dots to represent different data sets or you can use the dots to represent the performance of different players.

Here is an example we all understand very well - the fire ratings that we see in summer time.

Here's a great example of color grading.

Every year, Greenpeace puts out this guide to greener electronics and what they do is rank all of the big electronic players from best to worst.

They put the worst ones in the red zone on the left and the companies who get a really good score who are positioned over on the right hand side of the chart get assigned the color green. Now we don't even need to think to see what is going on in this diagram it is immediately understandable and that's the power of assigning color.

Here’s another couple of great examples.

The table on the left is the safety rating of vehicles. It's immediately obvious which are the safest vehicles and which of the most dangerous vehicles.

The safest vehicles get five star ratings in the color green up the top and the most dangerous vehicles only get one star that is assigned the color red on the board. And all the other vehicles get a different color that represents their status in between.

The score card on the left which again is produced by Greenpeace chose the most ethical and sustainable food retailers, ranked from best to worst.

It’s immediately understandable who are the best players who are assigned to green at the top who are the medium level performers, assigned in yellow and who are the worst performers,assigned in red.

These colors also trigger emotions that we then assign to these particular players, which in this case is companies.

Color grading can even become high tech.

The top example is called the Watson light, which shows you a different LED style of light.Depending on how much energy you are using. It’s the same kind of model that's used in the other example of the Energy Joule and the Ambient Orb.

They are always changing color based on how much energy you are using.

The Ambient Orb is a great case study.

It is a bowl that red when the customer is using a lot of energy it also glows all the other colors as well based on energy used.These colors cue the uses of the device to reduce their peak energy use by up to forty percent.

Now forty percent is a huge reduction and you can understand how it could possibly be this high because having a bowl in your home that was glowing different colors is an immediate and easy to understand thing.

It's not something like a text message on your phone or a smart meter of that's hidden on a wall - or even a number or an icon.

We just can't escape the immediacy of color.

Here's a sample design I created using color.

I thought it would be a cool idea to be able to get, the amount of energy that commercial buildings used and then rank all of the city buildings in a city by their energy intensity - and then put this information on a large digital screen outside the front of every building.

What I've done is add the position of the building in this example, so this particular building has come one hundred thirty second place in the whole city.

But, numbers can take a little bit of time to digest.

What we can instantly recognize is this building is scoring red, which is the worst score.

You can see on the screen, I've made a whole rainbow of colors.

Blue indicates the first to the twenty fifth place of the building.

then Aqua indicates the twenty fifth to the fiftieth place of the building followed by green, light green, yellow and orange. Each indicating where that building places, in the whole city of buildings that are all ranked in terms of their energy efficiency.

If you've got a good idea for using high tech color grading, you can use colored LED lights to indicate performance.

You can connect the lights with your database and then make the light signal based on changes in the data.

This is actually not that hard to do.

By simple electronics, that you can buy such as a set of LED lights, a soldiering iron and Arduino micro controller and you can do easy low tech color grading.

You can look for a color coded design and ###a href="http://istockphoto.com/" target="_blank">istockphoto.com. Like this one, that I found on the right with the number nine or you can use simple colored stickers it is or you can make your own colored school

If you're doing a project with a group of individuals or a group of teams, you could easily give people a color coded stickers based on their performance to help encourage change.

Let's dive into our zero waste tutorial!

To see how we can apply color grading to our example.

Step one, is using the same measurements from the previous steps, decide on five colors that you can apply to your players.

Now, when looking at the data for our example,our target that we want the counties to get to is zero.

Currently, San Francisco is in the first place. Producing one thousand and twenty one pounds of trash per person and Napa County, whose in the last place, is producing one thousand six hundred sixteen pounds.

So, the reason I've put these numbers on the screen is to get a feel, for the span of data that our colors need to apply to.

Now, it's unlikely that any of the counties are going to jump to zero anytime soon.

So, I've started the data range at eight hundred and I've got the data range going all the way up to eighteen hundred and this easily divides by two hundred pounds of trash, per person per year .

In first place, starting at Blue, with what eight hundred to one thousand then moving to a thousand to twelve hundred in the Aqua color then Green, we've got twelve hundred to fourteen hundred, moving on to Yellow at fourteen hundred to sixteen hundred and then in last place we've got Orange, that will use for any county that is scoring between sixteen hundred to eighteen hundred pounds.

After you assign your colors to your data set, you might want you might want to play around with it a bit to really get the feel right.

Step three, is to apply a color score to your players.

Based on the five colors from the previous slide, I've now applied those colors to the performance of each county.

Now, not one single county has gotten the blue color, that is the very best color to get. They all start on the second color.

So you've got San Francisco and Contra county, coming inthe Aqua Color.Followed by Santa Clara and Marin, coming in at the Green Zone then you've got these big chunk in the Yellow zone, which is fairly poor performing and even they got one county coming in.Last at the Orange.

So, I think this distribution of color isn't too bad.

We could even use more colors.

I've only used five here, but we could use even more granular colors to move up to.

For example,at or even ten colors.

And so now, we can apply the colors on the table in the left to the map on the right.

Here is your Color Grading Homework!

1. Using the same measurements from the previous steps decide on five colors that you can apply to your players.
2. Make sure the colors you choose are gradients of the same color scheme that represent your numbers.(that essentially means, just make sure your colors match. Make sure they naturally fade from one color into another color. Don't just randomly pick colors like jumbled up crayons because jumbled up colors would indicate a flow of data from best to worst.
3. Apply your color scheme to each of your players.

Adding color is a really fun way to help build up your gamification techniques.

I'm really looking forward to seeing what you've come up with!

Please post your homework in the Facebook group with the hastag #colorgrading.

I will see you in the next chapter!

Transcript

Gamification Technique #7: Star Ratings

A star rating provides your players with a score out of five stars.

Now, this is kind of like the star ratings you've seen in restaurants or hotels.

Criteria for giving stars can be easily based on quantitative measurements like energy consumption in kilowatt hours or what your star ratings compute based on a qualitative criteria.

Like how we determine the quality of a restaurant.And this is how simple star ratings are.

You have five stars for excellent, four stars for above average, three stars for average, two for below average and one star for poor performance.

A fantastic example of how star ratings have been used on real data in a way that's been genuinely helpful for environmental change is the Australian Appliancen Star Ratings.

You can see images of the stickers here.

These stickers that are on gas appliances, any type of energy appliances such as dishwashers, fridges or freezers and even water appliances like taps and showerheads are mandated by the government to be shown at the point of retail purchase.And these star ratings have been tremendously successful.

Let's look at a case study for the energy rated appliances.

In Australia, today's dishwashers, compared to those of ten years ago 25% less water. This change is attributed to the introduction of the mandatory energy labeling of appliances.

And one detail,it's important to understand about these successful star ratings, is that each star is based on real data that's measured in kilowatt hours, or liters of water ,or the amount of gas the appliance uses.

Now, these star ratings and not voluntary ecolabels. And, if it's available for you to get a system, where all of your players are somehow forced to disclose that data in the form of a consistent graphic like a star rating.This type of system can yield incredible results.

Here's an example app that I created called Zerowastify.

This app has been designed to measure the amount of waste that businesses and restaurants create. Then ,what it does is rank all of the different businesses that are using the app and show them in this star chart. (you can see in the image on the middle and the text indicates your performance compared to everybody else and you can see have also added color to the star rating to make it even more effective)

Now, let's jump into a zero waste example tutorial.

Decide on what criteria you will use to allocate the stars. I've started with the same criteria I used in the previous example rather applied the colors to different brackets of data. I already have five colors there,so now it's really easy to just apply a star rating to each color.

Divide your data span of best to worst.

Now, I wanted to add a little bit more granularity to the stars by adding half stars as well.

So, I have added in this half star ratings by dividing the bracket of data by half.

So now each half star represents one hundred pounds of trash.

Divide your data span of best to worst by five and create a table of specific measurements for each star and half star.

So what I've done here, is to create a simple table on the left hand column.

You can see the star rating the goes from five stars all the way down to 0.5 stars with every half star there and I've kept the color coding from the previous example.

Now, in the right hand column, you can see the criteria that we've used to assign the stars in pounds per person per year and you can see each half stars goes up by by one hundred pounds of trash per person per year.

So this table makes it very easy, for us to figure out what style we're going to give what player and to make the data public and easy to understand for everyone involved.

Next step of course is to give each player their star rating.

I've got the table here of the criteria way using to assign the stars.

Now I've created a table with the nine counties were using an our example.

The second column is the amount of trash they produce.

And then it's an easy job to just check the first table to see how much trash the counties make.

And simply assign them a star rating and of course a color as well.

And then we can have a graphic like this where we show the star rating that each county has achieved.

And also adding the color helps boost the communication as well.

Then, you can create a simple graphic like this that I called an easy title "Bay Area Waste Performance Start Rating".

You can see all the counties in order from best performing down to worst performing with the stars and the colors that we've assigned. And you can do something like this in any simple graphics program.

Communicate this star rating with whole of the players in your project.

You can print this type of graphic on a card and give it out in person or mail it to them or you can just email it to the city.

You can use this type of graphic in any type of zero waste program to help increase the motivation of the county.

You can apply this simple star rating tool to just about anything whatsoever that you want to change in the world.

The reason behind why these star ratings work, is that they should be based on real data that you're trying to change. Showing people the real numbers might be at first a bit confusing or take a bit of background information for people to understand but one of the key design features to understand about applying gamification techniques to social and environmental change, is that we're starting with the real world data.

And then was simplifying this data using graphic design tools that make the data really easy to understand and also encourage behavior change.

I think if your star writing like that's on the screen here, as a kind of a beautified Excel spreadsheet.

You're ultimately showing data, but you're showing it in a symbolic and beautiful way that encourages and inspires change

Now,let's summarize your star ratings homework!

1. Decide on what criteria you will use to allocate your star.And that really means what numbers and if it's qualitative, what qualitative criteria you'll use,
2. Divide your data span of best to worst by five (even ten if you want to use half stars) and create a table of specific measurements for each star and half stars.
3. Give each player a star rating.
4. Communicate to each player their star rating.( and I've added step four on there, because I really want you to start getting this information out into the world in real life! It doesn't matter if it's a big clumsy or first time! Don't worry about it it will just start getting the information out there and you'll be able to start testing how these type of star ratings influence your players and how they respond to the information.)

Don't forget to post your homework in the Facebook group with the hashtag #starratings

I'm really looking forward to seeing what you've designed and of course you can ask me any questions in the Facebook group.

I will see you in the next chapter!

Transcript

Gamification Technique #8: Heat Maps

In this chapter, we will be learning about heat maps.

Heat maps graphically show the geographic distribution of your data on a map. They generally use color to indicate data, but they can also use pins all flags.

Heat maps can be created by combining your data with the Google maps or Google Place API. So, a heat map is quite literally a geographic map.

But, we can still incorporate all about gamification techniques within a map. And that makes maps especially powerful

Here's an example of levels of traffic heat map over Boston.

You can see the red indicates the high traffic areas and the green indicates the low traffic areas.

Here's another heat map of Boston indicating the electricity usage,

This heat map is showing pollution levels in a city using this spike type of image.

This is a map of the United Kingdom showing the electricity usage in blue,

When you are creating your map, you can use the Google Map's polygon feature, that will create a box around every city or county or state, like how shown in the image here.

As you can see. you get every single different county identified by a different box and a different color added to each one.

And you can create this with an excel spreadsheet with the Google Maps tools. Or if you want to make a custom zone on a map, you can draw your own polygons using latitude and longitude.As you can see in this image here and it's actually quite easy to do.

Let's jump into a zero waste example tutorial

Step one, is to work out if your players are located in a specific area.

Now most people or projects or things do exist in a geographic map, somehow.

So, I think through this and trying to put them on a Google map. If you want to go more high tech to generate a heat map you can use the Google maps or places API and create polygons or pins. Then, try an add color grading to These specific locations.

And then include your heat map or your intensity map in your application. All you need to do to get started is to look up Google Maps developer documentation and there is a whole host of tutorials on Google's website and how to get started.

And it's really not that difficult at all but if you don't want to raid Google's technical documentation, it's super easy to also make low tech heat maps.

And how you can do this is, just look up your desired locations on Google maps and take a screen grab or you can even purchase or printed map at a store.Then use stickers markers or paper tags to indicate the color grading of your players. Or you can import the screengrab into a graphics program like canva.com or Photoshop and then you can manually add the polygons or icons. 

So, in this example here, all I need to do is get some colored pens and color in the colors for each one of the counties. I can add a pin and a sticker for all of my nine counties to indicate their performance and then we can use this heat map to further motivate our players to change.

OK, let's dive into our homework!

1. If your players are location specific is a location specific (most are!) put them on a Google map. And combine them with the color exercises from the previous example.
2. Choose whether you're going to use Google polygons or pins or markers then make a map with color grading and don't forget to actually distribute it to your players.

I'm really looking forward to seeing what beautiful maps that you can come up with. There is an absolute infinite amount of creativity that you can have with mapping. And I think we've really just touched the tip of the iceberg for what we can do with environmental data and maps.

Please do post your homework in the Facebook group with the hash tag #heatmaps

Don't forget that you can also ask me questions about Google Maps.

I have done a reasonable amount of work with Google Maps API. and I'd be happy to help.

We are now a little bit over fifty percent through the course.

So,if you have any feedback, now is the time to communicate it to me.

So, let me know if all of the slides and the concepts have been easy to understand.

Or if you've been confused about anything or if you have any ideas that I can do to make this course better.

Feel free to post your thoughts and ideas with the hash tag #feedback in the Facebook group or you can email me privately at kp@helloworlde.com,

I would absolutely love to hear from you.

Transcript

Gamification technique #9: Progress Bars

I am sure that you have seen progress bars before.

They are used commonly around the Internet and we can use them in our mission to save the world.

A progress bar visually shows the player’s current status on their progress from where they started to their destination.

A progress bar can provide a powerful psychological pull to get you'll players is to complete the tasks so that they can complete their progress bar.

You might think that progress bars sound pretty common and they are, but when we apply them to the mission of social and environmental change, they require true critical steps they're often forgotten about in most projects.

And that is, in order to make a measurement based progress bar, we need to know the starting point and we need to know it in numbers.

Then we need to know the ending point and we need to know that in numbers.

And these two pieces of information are numerically defined beginning and numerically defined ending.(are what is missing from so many campaigns!)

So when you're creating a measurement based progress bar like this one, you have your beginning ,you have your end, then you have your current status indicated by the color and the progress that the colored bar is along the progress bar and the color indicates your completed area.

You can also have a task-based progress bar, where instead of having one long line that's indicated by numbers kind of like a ruler, you have individual steps.

This type of progress bar are used when people are online and filling out forms. You might have a particular series of steps you need people to do.

So it's the same concept of having a start ,an end, a current status, a completed area and an uncompleted area but you can divide the progress bar up by nodes.

And as you can see at the bottom of the page, there are fifteen nodes.You can see it as little dots on the bottom of the page that indicate the progress through this course .

Because each course is made up of a chapter so it's much better suited to use this task-based progress bar for something like a course, than it would be to use measurement based progress bar.

Progress bar designs can be super creative.

Here are some examples I found on the Internet.

Here is a purple one with bubbles, one with grass, and orange one showing a flow of heat, this is a cute design with wood, some more color, and a some more grass.

Here is a progress bar design that I created on my zero waste game.

You can see the progress bar up here at the top.

What I've done is made the starting point at eighteen hundred pounds of trash per person which is the national average for the amount of waste that one American makes in a year.

And then, I've got the end of the progress bar being zero pounds of trash.

Which is the destination we want to achieve for our players is to make no waste at all.

As the user moves through the steps, each step is equated with a particular amount of trash.

Some steps like composting or quitting plastic bottles help reduce a big chunk of waste that's shown on the progress bar.

Whereas, other tips like for example using compostable dental floss make a very small if not indeterminable effect on the progress bar because they don't account for that much waste in pounds.

Now you can see the data also represented in the title across the top,

Each tip that the player adopts is represented by a numerical amount of waste.

Then, ideally the player moves through all of the zero waste tips.

Each tip assigned with a particular numerical value and then when they make it to the end if they agree to do all of the tips, their progress bar should make it from eighteen hundred pounds all the way down to zero.

Here's another design of the zero waste game I put together.

I put the progress bar at the top very similar to the previous example that's based on the numerical amount of waste going down for the player but I've also added a task-based progress bar at the bottom here.

So the player can see they have about ten different levels to get through and then they get a cute little icon like a banana or a mushroom that you can see every time they have made it through that level.

and thirdly these type of spots in the middle, in the grain circle are their own kind of task-based progress bar. The way this works is that we drag and drop the slug over each of the spots and each of the spots represents zero waste task.

You can see that the yellow spots indicate that the task has already been completed and the grey ones are still yet to be completed.

This is known as an eat-the-dot feature in game design. And it's inspired by Pacman,how Pacman goes through, and eats all of the dots.

Now, we can draw from this eat-the-dots type of game design and mix it in with the progress bar type of design to come up with something innovative like this.

Here's another design of an application, I've done to inspire university dorms to go from the current amount of waste they create, all the way to zero.

And as you can see, I've ranked the dorms from the highest performing to the lowest performing.

The data in this progress bar is a little different than just using actual waste data because you can see the highest performing dorm is calculated by a percentage out of one hundred.Meaning that they make such little waste that they are already close to one hundred percent zero waste.

And this is just one graphical way to represent our real world data.

And what's really exciting about this type of designs is that it's somewhat inspires natural competition because everybody wants to be doing the best and nobody really wants to be doing the worst.

Essentially, what this type of design does is just show you the information through the technique of disclosure. And it's the disclosure of data, when designed in a beautiful and easy to understand way that really inspires change. 

Let's dive into as zero waste example tutorial!

Step one, determine the measurable number that indicates way a player is starting from.

We've already got this data in at table here.

We know all of the nine players, we know all of our counties and we know how much waste each one of them produces and this is the starting point of our progress bar.

Then we had a column for what number indicates that their progress bar is finished and we want every county to get to zero waste.

So what represents finished for us is zero.

So now that we have a table with the numbers, where everybody is starting and where we want everybody to finish, we can now create a progress bar for every single player.

And as you can see, I've added a blank progress bar on the column on the right to get us started.

Then as time progresses, you can add fresh data that indicates the performance that each county is making on their race towards zero.

Because we're just out of this example we don't have ongoing data to check in to see how our county is going, but let's imagine with three months in on our rights to zero waste.

We could then add in all this data to see how much progress our counties have made on the journey to zero.

So we could pick one particular example of Santa Clara County and design them their own progress bar.It would start at one thousand two hundred twenty pounds per person per year with a destination of zero pounds.

Now, every month or however frequently we collect the data, we can then update the progress bar. And this progress bar should really motivate everyone to want to get that progress bar all the way to the end at the right to reach zero. 

It's really easy to make low tech progress bar.All you need to do is draw your progress bar on a piece of paper using a ruler and indicate the measurements on the bar.

Your player can cross off sections on the bat using a marker or a pencil as they reach each new level.

And you can see this super simple example template that here on the right.

Let's get started on our progress bar homework!

1. Determine the measurable number that indicates where your player is starting from which is the beginning.
2. Create a progress bar using these two data points to make the beginning and the end of the bar. Think through how you can update your progress bar as your players move through the tasks or otherwise change their data. You might need to think about some deeper technology solutions to try and draw the data out of your system so you can update your progress bar. Or you might find an easy way to do it manually by people communicating the data back to you.However, you do it just getting started by making sure you know the data about where your players are and where they're trying to go. And communicating that information with this simple progress bar will put you miles ahead of so many different environmental and social change campaigns out there.

Don't forget to post your homework in the Facebook group with the hashtag #progressbars.

I'd love to see your design mockups!

It's super easy to make these in just Google Docs or Microsoft Word or don't forget to check out canva.com as well,

Or if you more technically advanced, you're computer programmer it's really easy to find CSS and HTML templates that you can add into your application.

I will see you in the next chapter!

Transcript

Gamification technique #10:Behavior Charts

Now, these are really fun and I'm sure you've already had experience with them a behavior or sometimes it's known as a star chart or sticker chart is a simple and effective way to reward completion of tasks, levels of achievement, or time-based progress and seriously, and I make behavior charts for my own personal goals all the time.

I actually have multiples of them up around my house and they genuinely work and they work so well that we can start applying them to bigger issue problems. 

Here's an example of a task-based behavior chart.

It's a really simple design, it has thirty one spots on it and it's got a few positive motivational terms you can see it' says "Good Job" on one, and then there's "Keep it Up" and then it says "You Made It" at the end.

So this type of chart would be well suited to a task, such as I composted today or I rode my bike or I didn't use any plastic. And then what you do is get some stickers and then every time you achieve this goal, if your behavior that you want to change for the day, you put a sticker on the star chart.

And this is a great way for keeping you motivated and keeping accountability for your goal.

And what you can do if you're trying to motivate a whole team or a whole group of people, is custom designed one of the things, for your project and give it out to everybody,

If you were trying to get people to go plastic free, you could create one of this as a "30-day Plastic Free Challenge" and then distribute them to your audience or to a school or to your office and then get everyone on board to commit to the challenge and use the behavior chart as their form of motivation and accountability.

This is a slight variation called a calendar based behavior chart.

You can see that, we have the days of the week on the left hand column. And this is for when we want to do with thing every single day of the week,

Then we add the star to the box and it again keeps us accountable to our goals. 

This behavior charts can be really effective if you have a team of people that you need to motivate such as housemates in a house, employees in an office, with students in a school.

You might for example want to get all of your coworkers to stop purchasing disposable plastic bottles.

Now, if you can get everyone in your team to commit to this particular behavior, you can create a multiplayer behavior design chart like this one,where it has the date and days of the week, along the top row and then the names of the players along the left hand side row.

Then, every day we can give people in the team, a sticker or a star based on if they achieved the desired behavior. You can make it more fun by choosing more exciting stickers like charismatic mega fauna like whales,dolphins,pandas,lions,monkeys,koalas whatever.

I think when you're working with adults stars can feel a little bit kindergarten like but if you use more exotic stickers then adults can identify with the cause a bit more.

Don't feel afraid of trying to bring in a behavior designed child like this to try and bring about a behavior change in a group of people that you're involved with.

let's jump in to our example zero waste tutorial!

So the first step is to design a behavior chart.

I have designed this one as you can see it's super simple. I've done this in a Google spreadsheet and the behavior we want to do is to get everybody in the office to compost their fruit scraps.

And this is the specific behavior that we isolated in chapter two.

As you can see I've got the days of the month across the top row, from the first to the eleventh and then I've got our employees in the column on the left So this is a small office with six people and we are going to track whether they compost to their food scraps and what we're going to do is give every staff member a cherry sticker when they compost their food scraps and it will look something like this.

Look at all those cherries!

As we start to put the cherries on the board we'll see who are the high performing staff members and who are the lower performing staff members, who are being a little bit lazy.

And this type of accountability will help bring to the fore everybody's behaviors and should inspire greater measurable behavior change.

Now let's get started on our behavior homework!

1. Design a behavior chart .Think through whether you want it to represent days, tasks, or levels of achievement .You can also put multiple players on one chart (like employees in an office or roommates in a house)
2. Put your beautiful star chart up on a wall possibly somewhere that is publicly visible.
3. Buy some fun stickers and start sticking them on that chart.

I really want to see your star charts in action!

So make your star chart, put some stickers on it and post your homework in the Facebook group with the hashtag #starchart.

and I will see you in the next chapter!

Transcript

Gamification technique #11: Feedback Loops

Feedback loops are a little less commonly known about, but they are remarkably powerful!

So don't worry if you don't know what they are.

Feedback of data and progress tracking are processes of communicating the players data back to them immediately as they act.

Feedback loops facilitate personal agency by helping people know,they are there making a difference.

Let's try and make a bit more sense of that with an example of a feedback loop

This image shows the screen on a Toyota Prius and this is a quote about feedback loops from Wired magazine,"Think about how hybrid car owners become obsessed with the dashboard display showing an on-the-fly calculation of gas mileage. The result? They change the way they drive specifically trying to maximize mileage.It becomes a game and enjoyable challenge complete with quantifiable personal bests."

Let's go through the structure of a feedback loop.

It starts with data.

There's a machine somewhere that is gathering information about a process.

In the previous example, the car was gathering data about the gas mileage.Then. this data inspires the user-the person. to do an action. Then, this action changes the data because they're doing something differently, Like changing way they're driving. And then this change in the data then rewards the player like gives them a smiley face or it tick or a red dot or some kind of color or some kind of indication that they've done a good thing.

And then this reward, inspires the player to try again,to try and do better.

And then, this altered behavior feeds back into the data measuring system again. And then the loop of data and behavior, goes round and around again.

And if you want your feedback loop to be really successful and changing behavior?You need to get this process happening fast.

The screen on a Toyota Prius or an exercise tracker like a Fitbit, see information back to the human being in absolute immediate real time. So they're able to change their driving or they're able to change their exercise habits in the moment.

And unfortunately what happens with a lot of environmental and social change projects, is that they have a really big lag in that data feedback.Sometimes,data is collected only once per year. So you can imagine if the data is only collected once a year, there's really no way to feed that information back into a system of behavior change in any type of immediacy to create that type of motivation, those rewards and those changed behaviors that go back into the data feedback loop.

let's look at case study on energy consumption!

A review of 38 studies involving energy conservation showed that feedback about energy use reduced energy consumption by 10%.Ten percent is a big change when we're trying to reduce energy.

Let's look at another case study on paper recycling.

At a university. a feedback sign of reporting quantities of recycled paper increase the quantity of paper recycling by a huge 77%. So that means, that there was simply a sign at the point of where the paper was recycled showing just how much paper was recycled and the nature of disclosing this information in a feedback loop caused this huge jump in paper recycling.

In this case study on can recycling signs above recycling bins providing feedback about the number of cans recycled during the previous week increased recycling rates by 65% again putting 65%.Again.putting a sign above the recycling bin that showed the number of cans, motivated people to make this huge jump in the amount of cans they were recycling.

You've probably seen those digital signs that show you how fast you're going on the road.

Let's look at this case study on speeding in school zones. A display showing the drive the speed while driving through school zones. reduced speeds by 14%. An effect that even last had several miles down the road .

Let's look at another case study on water usage.

The Teague. design agency. hooked an i Pad to a tap and displayed a real time feedback, on water usage to tap users.Behavior has changed dramatically and water usage dropped by a huge 75%.You can see how dramatic these numbers through the power of feedback loops.

Feedback loops often require more advanced technology.

So they may not be available to you right now.

But now that you understand the principle, you can start keeping your eyes appealed for more ways to collect data more readily.

and Let's dive into the homework!

1. How will you show the data to the player? Think through how you'll get the data and how you will make it obvious to them?How will you get your players attention?Will you add a color like with the Ambient orb? or a light that flashes?Will you add a desktop notification?will something move? will something open or close?Will you change a color,somehow? There needs to be a way of flagging the player's attention at the very point ,the very specific time, when you want them to make this behavior change. And how will you use this to signal to your player to change their behavior?
2. After your player has done the behavior you want them to do, how will you reward them when they made this positive change? You could provide a smiley face, a color change ,a positive sounding noise or an automated email. Just think through a kind of immediate feedback that you could do to make that person feel really good about the change that they're just made.And if possible,how could you make this feedback loop happen in real time. What type of hardware?what type of senses can you put in the environment to gather data in real time. How can you pull that data into a server and get the information out to people ?To build a feedback loop yourself, you'll need some hardware.There are many senses you can purchase to help make a feedback loop. You can sense motion, weight, humidity, air pollution, light ,volume, heat... you can really get senses for anything you want. On the screen, you'll see an image of some senses they're generally not very expensive maybe ten or twenty dollars each and you can get them from this great website called sparkfun.com

If you have any questions about feedback loops or you'd like some help brainstorming how to design a feedback loop for your cause, please make a post in the Facebook group and I would love to help brainstorm to all with you.

and if you're able to do the homework for this chapter post your homework in the Facebook group with the hash tag #feedbackloop

I'm looking forward to hearing about it and I'll see you in the next chapter.

Transcript

Gamification Technique #12: Digital Screens

This is an exciting and high tech chapter,

###p

You can display your gamification mechanics and your feedback loop using a custom digital screen.

Digital screens can be useful addition to a smartphone and website application because they are not competing with the other apps on this device.

It's an important distinction to make in your behavioral cues to use signals that are outside of the normal things that we look at like smartphones and computers.

It's easy to think ,let's just use a notification on our smartphone but smart phone notifications are not really the best way to grab attention. And that's why using screens positioned in specific locations can be extremely powerful behavioral motivators because we're kind of forced to see them and they're not competing with all the other apps on our smartphones.

Digital screens can be placed in fixed locations where they can communicate critical behavioral cues to your audience at the right time.For example you could put a tiny digital screen underneath a light switch. The amount of energy the house was currently using in color or in numbers and if it was getting a hot color like orange or red you would then be cued to turn the light switch off. Because the screen is placed right under the light switch at the exact time and the exact location that you need to do this behavior.

Here's an example of a beautiful custom digital screen. This round screen that you can see in the image is called LEED Dynamic Clock.What this screen shows is the environmental impact of this building in the bars that curves around the circle and an overall score in the middle. And each of these bar will update dynamically based on the building's performance.

Here's another digital screen showing a smart meter which shows the amount of energy that a regular household is using. This digital screen in downtown San Francisco shows the number of cyclists who ride it down the Main Street and it accumulates a number for the total amount of cyclists riding during the day and in the vertical column it also accumulates the total number of cyclists that ride past this digital screen over the whole year .

It's actually not out of your reach, to get started creating a custom touchscreen. The example in this image is called a Raspberry Pie touchscreen. You can purchase this on Amazon from between around $20 to $50.They look much like a smartphone screen,they have touch screen functionality and you can connect them to Raspberry Pie which is a simple and inexpensive micro computer, that you can load your software on.Then you can create whatever application you can think up, load it onto the Raspberry Pie and then position your Raspberry Pie touchscreen at the point where you want people to make this specific behavior change.This approach is high tech but it is by no means unachievable. There are many tutorials available in youtube that you can look up and if this interests you check out websites like ###a href="http://lynda.com/" target="_blank">lynda.com, instructables.com and hacks.io for even more tutorials, so you can learn how to make your own touchscreen application.

Let's dive into our zero waste example tutorial

The first thing we need to do is buy our touchscreen,our raspberry pie, and possibly arduino board from one of these three websites. It's definitely worth taking a look at spark fun electronics at sparkfun.com. You can also get them from adafruit.com and also most things are available at amazon.com.

When I wanted to apply real time waste data to my zero waste application, I had to think about how I would start getting this data. It's possible that I could have gotten it from garbage trucks but this was a really long shot and garbage trucks actually don't collect individual data so my only option to get real time trash data and display it on a screen next to the trash can so I could use the numbers to help motivate people to reduce their waste, was to build my own smart trash can.

###psparkfun.com showed me exactly what to do and all of the electronic pieces that I need to buy, that you can see at the image on the left and then it actually wasn't all that difficult to sold all these parts together and then hook them into a web application that actually showed the data in real time.

So now, we have real time data that is measured every millisecond on how much this particular regular office garbage can weighs. It is shown on the Internet and now we have all of this electronic back end,we can use it to now create the beautiful front end that has the type of messages and colors that will create the behavior change that we want the people to do.

It's time to get started on your custom screen homework!

Don't feel obligated to try and do this particular chapter if you're not interested or you're not that crushed hard on technology.

But for those of you who are advanced high tech students I'm sure you will absolutely adore this challenge.

1. Purchase your raspberry pie touch screen.
2. Program your screen to display your data and game mechanics of choice.
3. Position the screen at the most optimal point in the player's behavior or in a public location. The art of behavior change is making sure or giving the person the signal at the exact time when they need to change their behavior.
4. See if you can automatically update the screen with the data based on your player's actions in a feedback loop.

This chapter on digital screens completely relies on the previous chapter of the feedback loop. So you need to be drawing your data out of the system, out of what you're trying to measure, putting it into the screen so the person can see it and then they'll change their behavior and then fade that back into the feedback loop.

And the closer you can get this feedback loop to real time, the more likely it will be that you'll be able to make big changes in your numbers.

I'm super excited to see your applications!

I really hope lots of people do get inspired to start building software and designing their own custom screens.

The world really is your oyster when it comes to designing custom screens that can actually show our environmental impact in real time.That are positioned in all of the appropriate location.

Post your homework about your screen design in the Facebook group with the hashtag #screens.

and Don't forget I'm available to ask any questions or to help brainstorm ideas with you in the group

and I'll see here in the next chapter.

Transcript

Gamification Technique #13: Badges

Badges are progress markers assigned to players as they move through the process.

A badge signifies a level of accomplishment or skill that your player has achieved.

Badges generally do not signify competition with other players.

What this means is that you can give badges out to people every time they make it through different levels of what you're trying to get them to do.

Badges aren't really designed to be competitive.You don't need to give a badge out as a marker of your player doing better than another player.

For example, you could give a badge out when a player gets to 10% of a goal or to 50% or to 80% ,regardless of what the other players a doing. And they can be great ways to get your audience or your players to stick with you and really motivated early on the journey of adopting this new change.

Here's some example badge designs that I found on istockphoto.com. Badge designs are up pretty much everywhere they're very easy to find and you can purchase them quite cheaply.

Here's some more badge designs you can purchase pre-made designs.As you can see on the image on the left or you can use a template and design your own.

Here's an example of badges used on the website Code Academy that are featured on a smartphone design.The way Code Academy works it is that every time a student makes it through several lessons with it learning how to write code they receive a badge and as they go through the courses they accumulate all of these badges .I've done several of the Code Academy workshops myself and I found these badges really boosted my self-esteem after doing this fairly difficult course.

If you want to take an easy on low tech approach to badges, you can give your audience stickers.

Here's some fun example stickers that I found on Amazon that you can give out to your players every time they reach a certain goal.

Here's an example of how I have used a badge in a web application that I've designed.

This is my is zero waste application to trashed, where the users go through various levels and they learn many different zero waste behavior change techniques. Such as giving up plastic bottles,composting more, or even using bamboo tooth brushes.

After the player makes it through Level one they receive this whale badge that I've called "Jesse the Whale" ttexts says "Level1 Complete! You've saved 339 lbs of trash from the landfill. You've won a badge! Here is Jesse the Whale".

I've made sure that it's actually very easy to win the first badge of Jesse the Whale". The player only needs to make it through five steps before they get this badge and that's a critical onboarding technique. To make sure we help player feel really good about themselves and motivated to keep going to the next step. As the player moves on there's about twelve levels in total they will win a similar type of badge with a friendly smiling cute megafauna after they complete each level

Here's another way I've added badges to a web application game.

In this game,our characters are avatar which is Slug Zero --The Banana Slug on the left .And if you aren't familiar with banana slugs they are these very curious little bright orange slugs that live at the bottom of redwood forests.

Our slug needs to go through all of the tasks which are represented by the yellow and the purple dots on the screen. When Slug Zero has finished or eaten all of the dots, Slug Zero will receive the badge of the rainbow icon, that you can see there on the right .And as Slug Zero makes it through all of the different chapters or all of the different levels,Slug Zero will receive a badge in the form of one of those cute icons that accumulate on this progress bar on the bottom of the screen.

As you can see, a Slug Zero has already won the mushroom,the apple ,the watermelon ,and the banana. And slug is just about to win the rainbow badge as well.

This type of design combines of progress bar style of game mechanic with a badge style of game mechanic and they work really beautifully together.

let's jump into has zero waste example tutorial

The first thing we need to do is to identify between five and ten distinct levels of competence or mastery that we can award our badges for.

I've chosen these five badges here that I found on this website icofinder.com which I would definitely recommend for finding badges or icons. Now that I've picked out my five badges I need to decide about what points in the progress of the player I'm going to award each badge. I'm going to start with the cherry badge and call this one "Put-a-cherry-on-it Congratulations you composted today! This is my first easy to achieve onboarding badge, the level of achievement to get this badge is super easy. It is the first day the person has composted so we can expect all of our players to achieve this first badge. And we can think of these badges as positive feedback in our feed back loop from the chapter earlier .

The second badge I'm going to award is the rainbows and we'll call it "rainbows for you" and the text says "Great job you've composited for five days in a row!" As we can see from this badge it's a little bit more difficult to achieve than the first badge of the cherry but it still requires a bit more investment from the player. They've now had to compost for a whole five days in a row to get the rainbow.

Our third badge is the Robot Dance and the text says "Perfect Streak! Like a robot of finely tuned skill. you've composted perfectly for 21 days in a row!"You can see that it's actually quite difficult now to get the robot dance badge and we should have hooked our player into the journey by giving them the first badge that was easy, the second badge that was just a little bit harder and we should have been quite motivated to get this next badge which is a bit difficult to acquire.

The fourth badge we're going to award is the polar bear. that we're calling the "Polar Bear of Force", (you really can't go wrong with charismatic megafauna P.S. That is why all of the big environmental organizations use them so much in their imagery) the text for the polar bear badge says "You've accumulated 50 days of composting! That's so much you've probably saved a polar bear's life!" Composting for fifty days in a row, is a huge achievement. So we want to make the player feel really proud about this. And of course saving a polar bear's life is a big deal.

The final and most difficult to achieve badge is "Mount Sustainability with the Flag on Top". We want to make this final badge extremely difficult to achieve and difficult to acquire so it truly represents mastery of the top task .The text for this badge says "You've accumulated 100 days of compositing! You have climbed Mt. Sustainability!" And when the player receives them Mount Sustainability badge, they should feel a huge sense of accomplishment and reward for giving them this badge.

And don't forget the critically important step of making sure that you have your one onboarding badge to help hook your player into the process.

I bet you are super excited to get started on your badges homework¬

1. Identify between five and ten distinct levels of competence on mastery you can award your badges for.
2. Use one badge for your player's first easy win as an on boarding badge.
3. Find your badge designs. You can design them yourself in canva.com ,you can purchase them from istockphoto.com or you can hire your own graphic designer from a website like upwork.com, to design your custom badges.

I am really looking forward to seeing what badges you come up with and how you're going to apply them to the levels of achievement that your players make, 

Post your homework in the Facebook group with the hashtag #badges.

Don't forget I'm always available to ask questions and to brainstorm ideas in the group

and I will see you in the next chapter!

Transcript

Gamification Technique #14: Awards

This chapter is going to be fairly similar to the badges chapter previously but there is a distinct difference in how we apply awards.

It varies a little to how we apply badges.

Awards give people status and reputation.They motivate people to continue their efforts because of a recognition from authorities and peers.

This means that we use awards, as a sign of competitive advantage to other players. And awards really do represent status and achievement.

Awards can be digital graphics or physical objects.

Awards reward people's effort in comparison with other players/

We should all be familiar with the type of physical awards that we get at award ceremonies or in sporting events. But don't forget that digital awards, can be just as powerful to motivate people's loyalty and to motivate change.

Here is some award design examples that I found istock.com These designs a really easy to find on stock photography and design websites and they really shouldn't be too expensive at all.

You can see from the graphic on the right that has a gold silver and a bronze type of design, but this is quite different to the badges where we just provided cute icons to reward people's progress through a series of behaviors or changes.

One exciting way that we can use awards is through custom pins.

Custom pins are hugely underutilized.

Here as some super cute examples that I found of a colorwheel, sewing machine, rollerskate, some cute little stars that said I got dressed today or a banana.

You can custom design your own pins to look like this, to look fun and cute and appealing. They don't need to just be a boring corporate logo.

You can also use physical badges like the images that you can see here.

These are really easy to design and make and you can give them and to your players when they receive a certain position in your game.

Let's look at this really interesting case study about Wikipedia editors.

This study found that a purely symbolic award given to Wikipedia editors increased the share of editors being active by a huge 20%. The awards also raised the share of authors who contributed content to articles by 13%. A 20% improvement just by giving editors a tiny digital flower is a really significant uptick in an activity that is really simple for us to implement in our applications or even in our non technology applications.

Here are some comments made by Wikipedia contributors after they received a graphical award, "Thank you very much for the recognition, I will continue contributing", and this one "I feel very honored to receive this award! It makes me realize that contributions even if they may be small are recognized here" .

This case study on charitable donations, found that individuals were asked to donate to the Heart Association. Those who were thanked and told,"You are a generous person. I wish more of the people I met were as charitable as you" gave 75% more when asked to donate to another charity.

Now, this case study doesn't give a physical award but what it communicates, is that even a verbal award ,merely a sentence expressing gratitude had the same effect or providing a 75% increase in donations.

As you can see. the type of numbers that we can achieve are really significant and that's why I'm so passionate about teaching this material.

In this case study on Open-data publication, the website Psychological Science gave authors a badge when they made their publications available as open data.

The badges cost a jump from 3% to 23% which is a multiple of thirteen times increase .Thirteen times is enormous. In the number of offers specifying open data the first year, and then it jumped even more to 39%. The next year it's really quite incredible to think that just by providing this simple digital award that we could get numbers to change so much by using this simple graphical tool.

Let's jump into out the zero waste example tutorial !

First, we need to find some award designs online.It was really easy for me to find these awards on istockphoto.com.

Decide at what point or rank on your player's journey you will provide the award. I've decided to use these two awards to award a whole counties.

For the first award, we will give an award once per year to the county with the lowest waste and for the second award we will give out an award to the most progressed county, that's the county that makes the biggest change even if they don't perform that highly.

In our example, we're also trying to get individual people in offices to compost more.

For the first award, we will give out an award to staff members with the most stickers.If you can remember our behavior chart from earlier, that had the cherry stickers for office members who compost, we will get at this tan-colored hats for the staff member who gets the most cherry stickers.

And the second award, we will give out for the daily compost challenge.

Here is an example of how you can use these badges in both a high tech and a low tech kind of application.

On the left, you can see the badge used in a smartphone application with a positive message that says "You've won the compost challenge."

On the right hand side, we have put the badge on a ppster that we're going to send to different counties that says "You've won the Bay Area Race to Zero Waste 2018" in this example,we would be creating an award poster that we would then provide to the county that won for that year.

Let's jump into our awards homework!

1. Find award designs online at iconfinder.com, istockphoto,com or shutterstock.com.
2. Decide at what point or rank on your player's journey you will provide the award.
3. Give the award to a player when they reach that point.

I'm hoping that your awards that you designed and give out are really going to create some positive impact on people's lives!

and I am really looking forward to hearing all about it so post your homework in the Facebook group with the hashtag #awards.

I can't wait to see and I will see you in the last and final chapter.

Transcript

Gamification Technique #15: Emotive Avatars

I have absolutely left the best until last.

Congratulations on making it this far in the course!

You are going to love this chapter!

First, we need to understand that all of our actions are ultimately driven by emotion. Emotions that are shown to us by an avatar or a mascot, can trigger our emotional response and drive us to act. What this means is that we are highly affected by the emotions of others and we can use these emotions in the form of cute animals to help drive us to change.

You might think by having come this far in the course that we're all just machines who are driven by data, but we are ultimately driven by emotion.

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And this is why cute emotional animals can work so well. It does not need to be difficult to use them. Here are some examples that I found on ###a href="http://istockphoto.com/">istockphoto.com

There were hundreds of different examples to choose from. I thought these ones were cute. What's great is that they've already covered so many of the different emotions already ready-to-go as stock illustrations.

You can see the owl here on the left, you've got all these different expressions ranging from happy, to angry, to tired, to sad, to exhausted. You've also got these crabs on the right and you can make up all sorts of text bubbles for what they say.

You've got an angry crab, a hiding crab, a confused crab, an excited crab, a happy crab. You can go to town on how you want these crabs to communicate to your players.

Here's some more examples of pandas: You've got pandas giving all these different gestures, and on the right here you've got these really cute little vintage robots that you can use as well.

Here's some more examples of a robot or a seal you can purchase these from istockphoto.com.

Then you can take them into a graphics program like Photoshop and then alter their expressions on the animals so they're communicating more emotions based on how you want to communicate to your players.

Just in case you were thinking that emotional animals were silly, let's look at this case study on using an emotive co-learner.

The case study found that the use of an emotionally expressive co-learner, which in this example was actually a cartoon owl, which was placed alongside a multiple choice learning game, increased scores by 23%, compared to using an inexpressive co-leaner (that means just a graphic of an owl with no expression at all).

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What was found by reading into this study a little bit more deeply is that, what the emotionally expressive owl did for the students was increase their levels of happiness in general positivity.

And with a general happier and more positive attitude, they were able to be more engaged with the learning experience which kept them concentrating longer, which led to the increase in their score.

The way to say this, is that the emotive animal cartoon is a kind of mood booster to keep people engaged with the material.

Here is an example of an emotional avatar that I've used in my game designs.

Down in the right you can see the little female action hero that I've used to represent the player in the journey to go zero waste.

In this other Zero Waste game I've used the banana slug and I found this really cute graphic I can use. So instead of the player just going through a whole bunch of often difficult behavior change techniques that really is a lot to learn, they're actually guiding Slug Zero, (the really cute and funny and quirky banana slug) through the activities.

My vision for the game is that Slug Zero shows a whole range of different expressions based on how the player is performing.

And what the player does to start to really emotionally connect with the slug and feel really responsible for the slug. Sort of that they need to make sure that slug gets through all the chapters in the game and out the other side.

Let's jump into our final zero waste example tutorial!

This example is super simple.

All I've done is gotten one simple snail graphic from ###a href="http://istockphoto.com/" target="_blank">istockphoto.com and adjusted the expression slightly -and this is how I'm going to use this snail to encourage our users.

We've given this snail a name called "Sally the Snail" and she says “Hi, I'm Sally the snail. I want your compost!”.

As we know, snails like to eat leaves and vegetables so it's a natural connection to use a cute animal like a snail to help encourage us to compost more.

As you can see Sally the Snail looks really happy.

Then we need to decide on a range of interactions for where we want to use the snail--what this type of interactions means,what kind of expressions we want to have on the snail and what snail is going to say.

I've got the first snail on the left,Sally the Snail is really simple as just saying “Great Job!” when a player does something we want them to do.

The second style in the middle has a slightly more frown-ish looking face and Sally is sad because she hasn't seen the player for a while. In this scenario if someone has been missing from the game we can have the smile pop up in their environment somehow and the message is “We miss you. Please come back!” into our game.

###pYou’re awesome!” This example is really simple but it just gives you a basic framework to start from with a few different emotions and a few different messages.

Now we need to make a more specific decision on how we will reward our players is using the animal Avatar. The first one I thought of was your composted after each day Sally the Snail says "Great Job!" so she would pop up on the screen or somehow every single day after the player has composited. Sally pops up and says "Great Job!".

The second measurement I thought would be a good idea is that if we haven’t seen the player for five days in a row.

In this case, the second snail emotion would show up which says, “We miss you!” with the slightly frowny face and hopefully this will encourage our player back into the game.

And then for a third emotion, I've chosen to apply this to the winner of the month which is the final snail with a big big smiley face that says "You totally killed it, You are awesome!"

You might think that we have already covered these type of positive rewards in both the awards and the badges chapter, but what's great about gamification design is that we can do all of the features all on top of each other.

You can have awards and badges and emotional Avatars as learning aides.

There's nothing wrong with giving your players an award and a badge based on their performance and giving them a cute little smile that pops up every day and says ""Great Job!".

As you can see indicated in this simple mock up that I've done the player has received five cherries for composting five days in a row they've got five stars and the style comes up and says "You're Awesome!".

And again, gamification does not need to be high tech. You can provide your emotional Avatar in stickers you can probably buy stickers from the store or you can get the made up quite easily.

Let's jump into our emotional Avatar homework.

1. Find an avatar on stock image sites such as ###a href="http://istockphoto.com/" target="_blank">istockphoto.como or shutterstock.com.
2. Decide how you can use it to reward your players when they make positive progress.
3. If you're designing your own avatars,sketch a range of expressions and animations your avatar will have in response to your players activity. You might choose a couple of different happy faces a couple of different sad faces,a confused face ,a lonely face to try and stick to using more positive expressions.
4. Consider hiring an artist from a website like upwork.com to provide you with a range of emotions for your avatar.

I can't wait to see what you come up with, so please post your homework in the Facebook group with the hash tag #avatars.

I really enjoyed adding the avatars to the games that I designed which as you might remember I used Jesse the Whale and the banana slug I really think it added that fun element to the designs .

and don't forget we are emotional creatures, we want to emotionally connect with other beings,we all love animals, we all love to have fun and there's no reason to restrict the type of fun we can have with this type of gamefication designs.

I hope you enjoyed this final chapter on Emotional Avatar I think it's a really fun feature to add to your design and I hope you like it,too!

I have added this final task as the cherry on the cake to the whole course.

And this is to write a blog post about your insights into the data and share it on social media.

What trends have been happening and what major factors affect these numbers?

The reason why I have added this to the very end is that, by this stage you should really deeply understand your cause and you should be able to write a compelling article complete with screen grabs and examples of the gamification designs you've done in this course, about why people should care about your cause - that is backed by the skeleton of understanding the numbers and understanding data.

I hope now that you can see gamification as a layering of data being at the center and then layering the data with all of these different techniques, where we have a positive and exciting and emotionally compelling product that we can show people that will entice people to change in a way that they really enjoy.

You did it!

Congratulations!

You have made it all the way through the course “Save the World with Gamification!".

I'm super proud of you for making at this far.

I hope you enjoyed the course and you've come up with some really fantastic designs that really do change the world.

To summarize, we’ve been over these fifteen techniques:

> Data

> Behavior change

> Disclosure

> Comparison

> Leaderboards

> Color grading

> Star ratings

> Heat maps

> Progress bars

> Behavior charts

> Feedback loops

> Digital screens

> Badges

> Awards and

> Avatars

These all fit together in the Russian doll strategy for change, with data at the center, wrapped in behavior change techniques, that we then enhance using the gamification techniques that we've been learning today.

Don't forget that gamification is part of the eighth step in the full “How to Save the World” course,where we cover a whole lot of other techniques about how to make real and measurable change in the world.

If you enjoyed what you learned in this course, then you will absolutely love the bigger course where we'll be adding in so many other techniques to make an absolutely bulletproof social change campaign that totally rocks the world.

Great job in getting this far! and Now go forth and change the world!

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Please do let me know if everything has been easy to understand.

If you're inspired to do this, please post a testimonial with the hashtag #testimonial in the Facebook group or you can email me privately at ###a href="mailto:kp@helloworlde.com">kp@helloworlde.com

As always I'd love to hear from you.

Thanks for being here.

It's been an absolute blast and I hope you are incredibly inspired to make Saving the World, The GREATEST GAME on EARTH!