ChallengeIt building the 21st century classroom economically

What if the boring classroom experience can become an immersive, effective and engaging game for both the student and instructor? What if a student could be motivated to accomplish more than just the learning requirements of a class? To make these things real, we propose ChallengeIt: a mobile application that allows students to compete with one another on challenges in their classrooms in a fun and interactive manner. The classroom can now be supplemented with a targeted “game”, where students can earn points by completing challenges, and having their instructors review those answers and award points. And students are free to use any medium or combination of media with which they prefer to respond to these challenges (text, PDF, photos, videos, etc.). This will make them able to always participate in the class (both at school and at home) in a way that makes them most comfortable. If the instructor so chooses, real-world problems could also be introduced into our solution, thereby allowing student efforts to be channeled into real-world solutions. In this paper we will introduce our ChallengeIt interactive game and cover the design and development details from a software engineering aspect.