About Just Press Play

Just Press Play is an achievement system developed in RIT's Media, Arts, Games, Interaction & Creativity (MAGIC) Center, which adds a playful activity layer to our undergraduates' daily life. It is intended to encourage students to engage in a playful way with their educational environments and experiences, to reflect on their accomplishments, and to strengthen their sense of competence and progress.

This software code base provides both server-side code and database, the front-end code and graphics, and the mobile application code for powering a Just Press Play implementation. What it does not provide is the content for individual achievements. This is because content for this type of system needs to be carefully crafted for the specific target audience.

In developing content for Just Press Play, we thought about the kinds of activities that the most successful students in Interactive Games & Media at RIT typically engaged in. We know, for instance, that student retention rates improve when students are making meaningful, positive connections with faculty and/or staff. To encourage those connections, we created achievements for our faculty and staff, which students could receive after engaging in a specific playful or creative interaction. One faculty member asks students to bring her a picture of themselves eating pie, and is covering one wall of her office with these photos; another challenges students to make her laugh out loud in order to earn her achievement. Our digital audio instructor asks players to bring him a ten-second digital audio clip of a sound from their world.

Other achievements are intended to encourage collaborative rather than individual work. Because we've had difficulty in getting more than 85% of our freshman to pass the introductory programming class, we created an achievement series called "Undying." If 90% of our freshmen pass the class, everyone playing the game would receive the achievement. In response, during the first year of Just Press Play, juniors and seniors spontaneously organized study sessions for the freshmen before the final exam. And while the students did unlock the achievement (91% of the freshmen passed the class), the real win for us was that the upper-class students enjoyed the tutoring so much that they have continued to run study sessions every quarter since then. The achievement served as a catalyst, but it was the activity itself, not the achievement, that was the real reward for the students.

Achievements can have points in any of four quadrants: Create (focused on creative work), Socialize (in-person interaction with faculty, staff, and/or students), Explore (discovery of real-world locations on campus and in the community), and Learn (gaining new skills or experiences).

Our content is guided by two key principles. First, every achievement should represent an accomplishment that a student would be likely to want to remember or share with others. Second, every achievement should be an optional activity—not tied in any way to class requirements. (Many achievements are easier to get if you've mastered the material for a class, but none explicitly require it.)

There are still rough edges in our code, particularly on the front-end, and we encourage you to help us improve and polish this implementation!