Towards Designing a Mobile Social Learning Application with Meaningful Gamification Strategies

In this paper, we present the research in-progress, which aims to design a mobile application that can support social learning experiences in a game-like environment. Our research was mainly motivated by the fundamental dilemma in children and new media that the penetration of digital media in children´s life poses both opportunities and risks. Adopting the key ideas of serious games, we have been investigating the design and development of a mobile social learning application leveraging the affordances of social networks and gamification. The purpose of this paper is to provide the initial design framework that has guided the design of our mobile social learning application. In particular, we present the analysis of the existing social networking sites designed for children, and extracted essential features. Overall, we found that the existing platforms are lack of supporting children´s internal motivation, and adaptation features for emergent and customizable structures. Design ideas and rationales are presented to demonstrate how our application has been conceptualized to incorporate meaningful gamification and adaptive learning strategies.