Gamification is widely used in digital learning. However, most systems neglect age-related differences. This paper investigates how gamification can be designed in an age-aware way to address learners' diverse motivational and cognitive needs. Based on a targeted literature review, we present a mapping of age groups, mechanics, and effects. Furthermore, we derive five design principles for age-specific gamification and identify three technical patterns for implementation in multimedia learning environments. The results indicate that gamification is not universally effective, but rather requires a differentiated design to support engagement and inclusivity across the lifespan.

Abstract To gain a common understanding of an application’s layouts, dialogs and interaction flows, development teams often sketch user interface (UI). Nowadays, they must also define multi-touch gestures, but tools for sketching UIs often lack support for custom gestures and typically just integrate a basic predefined gesture set, which might not suffice to specifically tailor the interaction to the desired use cases. Furthermore, sketching can be enhanced with digital means, but it remains unclear whether digital sketching is actually beneficial when designing gesture-based applications. We extended the AugIR, a digital sketching environment, with GestureCards, a hybrid gesture notation, to allow software engineers to define custom gestures when sketching UIs. We evaluated our approach in a user study contrasting digital and analog sketching of gesture-based UIs.

It is often difficult for stakeholders with heterogeneous backgrounds to maintain a common understanding of the most important risk and value drivers of a complex software project. Therefore, I propose the concept of a so-called Augmented Interaction Room, i.e. a persistent physical team room whose walls are outfitted with large interactive displays. It provides a dedicated project space for supporting collaborative system design and the communication among members of a software development project. In this paper, I describe the specific challenges regarding visualization and navigation on these large displays and present my approach on how to support stakeholders by automatically identifying inconsistencies, contradictions and potential project risks.