StudyCrafter is a free playful platform where users can create, play, and share research projects to advance our understanding of human behavior together. It is intended for teaching research and conducting the next generation of social and behavioral science research – and to engage the public at large with scientific research across the world. It takes a playful approach to science: it inspires users to find creative ways to explore human behavior and enables them to create gamified projects to engage their participants.

StudyCrafter aims to transform research by using game design and crowdsourcing techniques and technologies. Here we explain what this platform can mean for your research.

• Rethinking Research
  • StudyCrafter has been developed in response to a number of challenges that the social and behavioral science face and the opportunities that game design and crowdsourcing technologies and techniques provide.
• Engaging Participants
  • Traditional research often consists of simple tasks without clear goals and uses external motivations to gather participants. By gamifying, we add clear goals that intrinsically motivate participants.
• Broadening Participation
  • With traditional research, the participant pool often consists of students in higher education. Games appeal across ages and cultures. By crowdsourcing, the population can be broadened.
• Including Context
  • Traditional research aims to reduce the number of variables and assumes that abstract tasks are better generalizable. However, often the context of tasks matters and games enable to immerse participants in situations in a believable manner.
• Encouraging Replication
  • With traditional research, researchers often do not pursue replication due to the efforts involved. With StudyCrafter such efforts can be initiated in a few button clicks.
• Increasing Complexity
  • In traditional research, researchers avoid complex research designs that consider multiple variables because of the difficulty of attracting sufficient participants. By crowdsourcing it becomes possible to increase the complexity.
• Personalizing Tasks
  • Traditional research takes a one-size-fits-all approach, which controls for task variability but ignores individual variability in how tasks are engaged with. In the near future, StudyCrafter seeks to help in personalizing research.

See the StudyCrafter website