WEATHER DATA GAMIFICATION a Thesis by ROHIT
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WEATHER DATA GAMIFICATION A Thesis by ROHIT VASANT GARGATE Submitted to the Office of Graduate Studies of Texas A&M University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF SCIENCE Chair of Committee, Frank Shipman Committee Members, Richard Furuta Katherine Weimer Head of Department, Hank Walker August 2013 Major Subject: Computer Science Copyright 2013 Rohit Vasant Gargate ABSTRACT Climate change is an important issue for public policy. Unfortunately, although there are volumes of data about climate change, many members of the public are informed about the issue by politicized interpretations of the data. This is an impediment to planning policies and strategies to counter the impact of climate change, and identifies a need for climate awareness in the public. This thesis explores using gamification to motivate people to learn about long term trends in climate data. As a model for this edutainment activity, we choose a medium that engages millions of players to learn about large sets of data - Fantasy Sports. Fantasy sports have been shown to increase the player’s knowledge and understanding about the domain of the sport being played. With the huge amount of weather data available, we have designed and developed a fantasy weather game. People manage a team of cities with the goal of predicting weather better than other players in their league, and in the process gain an understanding of the weather patterns and climate change trends for those cities. We do a user-study to evaluate our application and prove its feasibility. An evaluation of the fantasy weather game indicates that the game had the desired effect of causing players to explore weather data in more detail. The evaluation also pointed out a number of potential improvements to the current prototype. Overall, the evaluation supports using the model of fantasy sports to motivate people to learn more about weather and climate data. ii DEDICATION This thesis is dedicated to my loving parents, my younger sister, my elder sister and my brother in law for motivating me, to my wonderful friends for their unconditional help and to Dr. Frank Shipman for constant inspiration and guidance. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost I offer my sincerest gratitude to my advisor, Dr. Frank Shipman, who has supported and guided me throughout my research with his patience and knowledge whilst trusting me to work in my own way. I would like to express my gratitude to Dr. Richard Furuta and Katherine Weimer for being a part of my thesis committee. Thanks to my on campus job supervisor Dr. Shannon Walton for supporting me and being flexible with my schedules when I needed. I would also like to thank my parents and my family members for motivating me. Finally, thanks to Gabriel Dzodom and Ross Peterson for providing valuable inputs and helping me throughout my project, and my lab-mates James, Sampath, Josh and Aatish and all my friends for believing in me and being there for me whenever I needed. I am grateful to everyone who has helped me in some way or another throughout this entire duration. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT .......................................................................................................................ii DEDICATION ................................................................................................................. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .............................................................................................. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ................................................................................................... v LIST OF FIGURES ..........................................................................................................vii LIST OF TABLES ............................................................................................................ ix CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION AND LITERATURE REVIEW ................................... 1 1.1 Evolution of fantasy sports ....................................................................................... 2 1.2 Impact of fantasy sports ........................................................................................... 6 1.2.1 Fantasy sports and media use ............................................................................ 6 1.2.2 Fantasy sports and actual sports ........................................................................ 8 1.2.3 Fantasy sports and economy ............................................................................ 10 1.3 Motivation behind fantasy sports ........................................................................... 13 1.4 Introduction to climate change ............................................................................... 15 CHAPTER II RESEARCH MOTIVATION ................................................................... 20 2.1 Public perspective on climate change .................................................................... 20 2.2 Why fantasy sports? ............................................................................................... 23 2.3 Related work .......................................................................................................... 27 CHAPTER III FANTASY FORECASTER APPLICATION ........................................ 32 3.1 Registration and login ............................................................................................ 33 3.2 League and team creation ....................................................................................... 35 3.3 The playscreen........................................................................................................ 39 3.4 The achievements page .......................................................................................... 40 3.5 Facts and news page ............................................................................................... 40 3.6 Other pages ............................................................................................................. 42 CHAPTER IV FANTASY FORECASTER GAME PLAY ........................................... 43 4.1 Playing the game .................................................................................................... 43 v 4.2 Achievements and weather-station......................................................................... 46 4.3 Leaderboard ............................................................................................................ 48 4.4 Player performance ................................................................................................ 50 CHAPTER V EVALUATION AND RESULTS ............................................................ 53 5.1 Evaluation............................................................................................................... 53 5.1.1 Participants ...................................................................................................... 53 5.1.2 Application modification for survey ............................................................... 54 5.1.3 User-study protocol ......................................................................................... 54 5.2 Evaluation analysis and discussion ........................................................................ 56 5.2.1 Pre game survey .............................................................................................. 56 5.2.1 Gameplay ......................................................................................................... 58 5.2.1 Post game survey and interview ...................................................................... 61 CHAPTER VI CONCLUSION AND FUTURE DIRECTION ...................................... 70 REFERENCES ................................................................................................................. 72 vi LIST OF FIGURES Page Figure 1. Scan of a GOPPPL fantasy football drafting scorecard from 1963 [3]. ............. 3 Figure 2. Fantasy sport logos of some major companies. .................................................. 4 Figure 3. Sirius XM launched a 24/7 sports radio channel [22]. ....................................... 8 Figure 4. The cover of ‘The Hollywood Reporter’ of the August 2011 issue [32] .......... 12 Figure 5. Global Mean Sea Level (GMSL) from 1880 to 2012 [46]. .............................. 15 Figure 6. The Chacaltaya glacier, Bolivia, from 1940 to 2005 [52]. ............................... 16 Figure 7. The cover of August 13, 2007 issue of the ‘Newsweek magazine’ [70]. ......... 21 Figure 8. Logo of the ‘Fantasy Snowfall League’ by ‘The Weather Channel’ [95]. ....... 28 Figure 9: Screenshots from the weathergeek website (http://www.weathergeek.net). .... 29 Figure 10. Reality Drop website ‘gamifies’ climate change to spread awareness [96]. .. 30 Figure 11. Login screen (left) and the registration page (right). ...................................... 33 Figure 12. The options strip is available below the logo at all times. .............................. 34 Figure 13. The homescreen of the gameplay. .................................................................. 34 Figure 14. Team can be created in three ways. ................................................................ 35 Figure 15. League creation screen. ................................................................................... 36 Figure 16. City selection page while creating a league. ................................................... 37 Figure 17. User can choose