A seminar on Healthy Cities was organized in February by the Institute for geotecrmatics (ifgi) at the University of Münster and by the Geospatial Technologies Research Group (GEOTEC) of the Institute of New Imaging Technologies at the University Jaume I of Castellón. The seminar lasted one week and students learned the basics about healthy cities, environmental monitoring, volunteered geographic information, gamification techniques, and Android & iOS programming. Later, students, working in groups, were challenged to develop a game to gather VGI that would raise the number of incentives, users, measurements and coverage areas to increase the amount of noise data through gamification techniques.

The seminar concluded successfully with the final group presentations of interesting prototypes of game applications. Furthermore, some of the students have taken advantage of the work performed and the data obtained to publish a paper (see reference below) in the Mobile Gaming workshop (moga 2012)  in the context of the prestigious 11th International Conference on Entertainment Computing (ICEC 2012)  that will be held next September in Bremen, Germany.

Irene García, Luis E. Rodríguez, Mauricia Benedito, Sergi Trilles, Arturo Beltran, Laura Díaz, Joaquín Huerta (2012) Mobile application for noise pollution monitoring through Gamification techniques. Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Entertainment Computing. Springer. Sept 26-29 2012. Bremen, Germany.

Some images depicting NoiseBattle game prototype presented in the paper.