ClassApp: A Motivational Course-level App

Mobile technologies are becoming essential in the academic life of university students. They are drastically changing the way people live and perform activities in recent years. For example, students attend lectures with their smartphones, and tablets and use them to read, record, type or search for information in real time. Students continuously interact with their smartphones while at home or on the move (e.g. on the bus), thereby opening new opportunities for technology designers to tap into the ubiquitous nature of mobile phones to design mobile applications that will continuously engage and empower students to improve their learning. As a result, mobile applications can be used in education to motivate students to learn using various established persuasive strategies. This paper presents the design and implementation of two visualizations of a persuasive mobile application for engaging students and promoting learning using various persuasive strategies. The app operationalized the social comparison and social learning persuasive strategies which provide students with the opportunity to compare their performance to that of their peers or learn from others performance and model their learning approach to perform better academically. Our experiences and interaction with students during our previous study necessitated this app design.