The agriculture sector is a major of source income for over 80 percent of the Ugandan population (also true for most of sub-Saharan countries). According to the Uganda Census of Agriculture 2008/09, agriculture provides employment for about 70 percent (8.8 million) of the working population and accounts for over 25 percent of the national GDP. The agriculture sector, however, remains unattractive to the youth who contribute about 65 percent of the total unemployed persons in the country (UBOS, 2012) [4].
Research has shown that gamification [5] is an efficient technique to improve people's engagement and effectiveness, change people's behaviour and attitudes. According to Wikipedia [5] "Gamification is the concept of applying game mechanics and game design techniques to engage and motivate people to achieve their goals. Gamification taps into the basic desires and needs of the users impulses which revolve around the idea of Status and Achievement."
This masters research project aims at exploring the use of Gamification as means to attract the youth to agriculture. Research activities will include review and analysis of exisiting gamification techniques, identification/design of suitable gamification strategies appropriate for attracting the youth to agriculture, implementation of a gamification toolkit and an agricultural game artifact enriched with gamification, evaluation of the artifact with a selected number of youth. The expected output of this research project include but not limited to: gamification strategies/toolkit and an agricultural game as a case study (e.g., farming game). The research project is expected to leverage the growing use of mobile devices among the youth.
This project requires the student to have (or develop) good programming skills
Engineer
Bainomugisha < baino at cis dot mak dot ac dot ug >