Rocket Team

Challenge: Over the past decade, we’ve seen an increasing use of gamification in mobile applications to increase the engagement and fun of athletes in individual training and sports. Gamified applications such as Fitbit, adidas Running, Nike+, Fitocracy, Strava, to name a few, inspire crowds of athletes to exercise regularly. However, there is a lack of knowledge and concepts on how to gamify traditional team sports such as football, basketball, baseball, or floorball and their training. Thus, in cooperation with adidas AG we gave students participating in the lecture Designing Gamified Systems the following challenge:

Design and investigate a novel digital gamification solution for your favorite team sports in order to increase the athlete’s individual or social training experience, their training performance, and the social dynamics (e.g., cohesion and team identity) within a sports team.

Five project teams worked on this challenge and developed impressive concepts and prototypes within two months, which were then presented to adidas AG executives.

Date: Summer semester 2022

Results: 

Rocket Team

Team: Dardan Berisha, Florian Enders, Rebecca Greiner, Anna Hollendonner

Abstract:

We are Rocket Team. Our vision is to motivate training partners to cooperate easily and thus help them improve upon their individual strengths as well as their team skills. For this purpose, we have developed a gamification approach that engages multiple Volleyball players to cooperatively train together. It is set into a new environment, a foreign planet on which the team must accomplish several challenges to build up a base and a rocket to escape the planet and move on with their mission.  This concept is embedded in a mobile application that players can use as part of their training. Within the two-months-project we have developed a minimum viable product in Unity and Blender and investigated on user feedback. In the future, actual training data could be captured with the Adidas GMR tag to measure training success.