Structured curriculum in domain-specific knowledge and personal development of graduate attributes are both important components of tertiary education. Prior gamification research in tertiary education has mostly evaluated gamification as a system and largely in structured curriculum-based learning environments. There is insufficient understanding as to how different gamification mechanics affect learning experiences in self-driven personal development areas outside of the structured curriculum. We present a study with 20 tertiary students over seven days with AdventureLEARN, a gamified online platform to engage students in a self-driven journey of continuous personal development alongside their curriculum work. Through an analysis of data collected from experience sampling and focus group discussions, we found that, amongst other findings, gamification mechanics that were meticulously contextualized to specific platform features afforded the most positive experiences across various dimensions, leading to our main insight highlighting the importance of maintaining a co-development process between individual gamification mechanics and platform features.

Navigating large-scale virtual spaces is a major challenge in Virtual Reality (VR) applications due to real-world spatial limitations. Walking-in-place (WIP) locomotion solutions may provide a natural approach for VR use cases that require locomotion to share similar qualities with walking in real-life. However, there is limited knowledge on the range of experiences across common WIP methods to inform the design of usable WIP solutions using consumer-accessible components. This paper contributes to this knowledge via a user study with 40 participants that experienced several easy-to-setup WIP methods in a VR commuting simulation. A nuanced understanding of cybersickness and exertion relationships and walking affordances based on different tracker setups were among the findings derived from a corroborated analysis of think-aloud, interview, and observational data, supplemented with self-reports of VR sickness, presence and flow. Practical design insights were then constructed along the dimensions of cybersickness, affordances, space and user interfaces.