Research database

Researchers have recently focused on unexpected problems resulting from excessive and frequent use of personal devices, such as smartphones, and online services and applications. These problems gave rise to a new kind of psychological "digital" wellbeing, investigated from different fields such as Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and psychology. As a result, we now have technological solutions that help users self-regulate their technology use with interventions like timers and lockout mechanisms. However, previous works highlight that achieving digital wellbeing is a path of personal growth that requires education more than self-monitoring strategies. This project aims to design, implement, and evaluate a novel web-based gamification platform for "teaching" digital wellbeing at school or as a part of other educational programs. The generalizability of such a platform is crucial so that it can be used in different situations and for different purposes. Teachers and educators can use the platform to establish personalized learning paths for teenagers through End-User Development (EUD) techniques. In addition, the learning paths will adapt to different devices and, thanks to Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods, to the context where teachers and educators envision the educational path. In the context of a high school class, for example, a teacher could set up a gamified learning path that, through a mobile application, will empower students to collaboratively learn how to use their smartphones more consciously and give more space to interpersonal relationships. The theoretical investigation will be grounded in the challenging empirical goal to derive guidelines, requirements, and best practices for designing a common digital platform based on gamification for supporting teachers and educators in promoting digital wellbeing to teenagers. Throughout the project, we will employ co-design techniques to elicit both requirements and the actual needs, values, and practices of all the involved stakeholders, i.e., teachers, educators, and teenagers. To this end, we plan to involve Italian high schools and associations working with teenagers in the project. The work plan is based on parallel experimentations, partially independent of each other, to reduce dependability and maximize velocity while using shared measures and tools to reflect on the experience and feed the shared documents of requirements, guidelines, and best practices. We will adopt rapid prototyping and multiple rounds of design ideas evaluations. At the same time, long-term research will be aligned within the research communities relevant to the project. In this respect, the project will combine an experiment-driven approach with a community-based discussion by involving researchers in the fields of HCI, EUD, and AI in workshops and symposia. Similarly, the communities of practitioners will be involved to discuss the ideas and champion the results.