Using gamification in outreach camps: Experience from an information systems program

• Main Authors: GOTTIPATI, Swapna, SHANKARARAMAN, Venky
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2018
• Subjects: Outreach; Junior College Students; Information Systems; Design Thinking Methodology; Computer Sciences; Higher Education
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/4227; https://doi.org/10.1109/FIE.2018.8659296
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Reaching to young generation and attracting them to computing programs such as Information Systems (IS) and Computer Science (CS) is a key challenge faced by universities in Singapore. During their application process, many high quality students from junior colleges (JC) either don't choose IS program or choose IS program as the last option. School of Information Systems (SIS), Singapore Management University, decided to implement an innovative outreach program to reach and attract high quality JC students. A team of 30 faculty and staff worked on an outreach project to study and analyse the rationale behind the smaller numbers of applicants. We surveyed JC students and the results showed that only 5% of top JC students were aware of the term 'Information Systems' and this seemed to be the root cause for low numbers and quality of applications to IS school. This shows that awareness is the first issue that should be tackled in our outreach. The outreach team unanimously agreed on executing an outreach camp which is designed to familiarize JC students on three main aspects; the value of IS in solving real world problems, common IS topics and IS related jobs. We have executed several outreach camps since our first run and have observed significant improvements in the number and quality of applications. In this paper, we share the gamified design of the outreach camp, results, challenges and lesson learnt in running an innovative IS outreach camp. We hope, our project will aid the university outreach teams in designing and organizing the outreach camps to the Gen-Z students.