Top 10 Apps To Help Improve the Lives of Autism Spectrum Children (2023)

op Ten Apps To Help Improve the Lives of Autism Spectrum Kids

Most of you probably know of at least one family with a child on the autism spectrum. The current prevalence rate has been estimated to be about 1 in 68, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Because the range of symptoms varies so widely, it can be difficult to quickly describe what this condition is in a way that applies to all children on the spectrum (contrary to public perception, autism can be variously expressed in different people).

Generally, these children have speech and social deficits. Tantrums can be a common expression because they lack the communication skills to communicate their needs and feelings.

While some show extraordinary aptitudes in certain areas, many have trouble learning in the same way as their non-autistic peers. Therefore, teaching has to be highly specialized to accommodate the unique ways these children take in and process information. Proper educational tools and strategies can help these kids better integrate with social settings and even the world around them.

So how can Gamification help?

According to Natalie Webber, M.S, “The iPad has become a great tool when working with students on the autism spectrum because it gives them the ability to control a piece of their environment and an opportunity to communicate.”

The number of apps being developed for autism spectrum children has soared due to the high demand for such tools. Here are ten that are highly recommended.

Continue reading Top 10 Apps To Help Improve the Lives of Autism Spectrum Children (2023)

Top 10 Education Gamification Examples for Lifelong Learners (2023)

These gamification examples were tested by Erik van Mechelen, based on the gamification framework–Octalysis–created by Yu-kai Chou.

Education Gamification Examples for Lifelong Learning

Each of us learn every day, even if we aren’t trying to. As humans, we pick up new ideas through mimicry and even by osmosis. Well, maybe not exactly by osmosis, but it sure feels that way!

Here are 10 gamification examples from education for lifelong learners. Be sure to tell me what I missed in the comments 🙂

As before, I’ve included the ever-powerful Game Techniques along the way.

Continue reading Top 10 Education Gamification Examples for Lifelong Learners (2023)

An awesome guide to becoming an Online Course Entrepreneur (from an OP Member)

Have you heard of the Great Resignation?

That’s when people quit their jobs during COVID-19, and ride off into the sunset to start a new glorious journey of self-employment.

But guess what, the Great Resignation is turning into the Great Regret for many people, as they struggle to find viable ways to stay afloat without a job.

In fact, even know 29% of those who quit their jobs have gone back to full-time employment (and those are the lucky ones – many of them can’t even get their jobs back).

At the same time, the online education industry is nearing a billion dollars A DAY in sales. That’s a lot of people buying a lot of courses!

Don’t you feel there is some kind of imbalance here, AKA a Great Opportunity!

Now many people want to create an online course, but most would-be course creators end up throwing their courses in the trash because of low sales, low engagement and low student results. 

So how do you avoid the dreaded course graveyard and create a course your students not only buy and finish, but will get so much value from they buy from you again and again?

Of course, one way is just to upgrade your fundamental skills in the Octalysis Framework and Behavioral Design through my Octalysis Prime mentorship program (It’s like downloading my brain with over 1000 videos on understanding how the human mind works and creating desired behaviors).

Octalysis Prime Learning Platform


But another GREAT opportunity just showed up too. My friend & course expert Marisa Murgatroyd (who’s also an OP Member who learned and applied the Octalysis Framework into her work!) made 3 very simple tweaks to one of her courses, and BOOM:

Her sales and engagement skyrocketed, her students got incredible results — turning them into loyal fans who signed up to work with her again and again. 

In fact, I can verify that she went from “trying to figure it out” to suddenly selling $33 Million worth of courses in the last few years!

She’s had some students who have now spent 30x or more their initial investment to work with her year after year to continue growing their business.

So it’s safe to say she’s figured out how to avoid the course graveyard.

So what does that have to do with me?

I just learned that Marisa is sharing her incredible secrets away in a free brand-new Guide. 

It’s called The Dopamine Button: 3 Brain Hacks That Skyrocket Your Online Course Sales

Dopamine Button Online Course

If you’re selling any kind of course, coaching program or digital product you’ll want to look into this. 

Marisa will basically show you:

Continue reading An awesome guide to becoming an Online Course Entrepreneur (from an OP Member)

How to Gamify an Online Course with Octalysis

It might go without saying, but if you’re an educator, thought leader, expert, consultant, coach, or business owner who wants to make an impact and grow your business, then your number one job is to get your ideas out into the world as effectively as possible.

After all, it’s only once your ideas are out there in other peoples’ hearts and minds that you have a chance to be part of a larger conversation, influence opinions, and start to bring the massive positive change you’re here to make.

Plus when you’re a part of the conversation, your thinking evolves, your ideas improve, and you inspire people you’ve never met to create a movement around your ideas.

The most common ways to get your ideas out there are blogging, books, talks and speeches, podcasts, and social media. 

But lately, I’ve been digging more and more into courses as a way to bring more people into my business and immerse them deeply into the world of gamification and behavioral design.

I’ve found that courses make it possible to train and teach in a deeper way that’s more effective than a book, a talk, or a podcast. Plus you can charge a lot more for courses and coaching programs than you can for books. Depending on the value you deliver, you can charge anywhere from several hundred dollars to several thousand dollars per unit, coming in while you sleep.

They’re not anywhere near as time-consuming as traditional consulting, because they’re assets that you create once that keep paying you for life.

And even better, courses give me an unparalleled opportunity to ascend the right people upward to my high-ticket gamification and behavior design certification programs and other premium programs in a way I simply can’t do anywhere else.

What I’ve just described is an incredibly leveraged and profitable income stream, but success actually hinges on a little-known factor that most people never think about when they create a course: the number of students who end up completing it.

You see, when most people set about creating a course, they never think about it from the point of view of student completion. In fact, it usually never occurs to most course creators that students would abandon their course.

But the statistics tell a different story. 

In fact, I was shocked to recently learn that the industry average course abandonment rate is actually well above 90% (with some studies even reporting numbers as high as 97%.) In other words, up to 97% of people don’t complete and get results from the courses they buy. 1

There are a lot of reasons why this might happen of course, but in my experience, it mostly comes down to the fact that “traditional” courses, in general, are not particularly gamified and don’t leverage much of the Octalysis framework to keep students engaged. And as a result, they struggle (and ultimately, fail) to keep students motivated, excited, and engaged.

Continue reading How to Gamify an Online Course with Octalysis

Food Heroes Octalysis Prime Design Challenge, Part 2 (2019)

Two years ago, we sent Food Heroes Design Challenge Winner Mayur Kapur to Shanghai for a week to work with JUCCCE on a major campaign to improve children’s eating habits and simultaneously boost the health of the planet. 

What to expect from the Food Heroes Design Challenge

This year, we have just begun Food Heroes Design Challenge, Part 2, where once again one skillful Octalysis designer will win their ticket to Shanghai all expenses paid to see how their design is implemented by the JUCCCE team. This could be you!

Free Trip to Shanghai
Free Trip to Shanghai

Normally, our design challenges are exclusively for Octalysis Prime members, however, we are so excited about the impact Food Heroes can have that we wanted to open this challenge to the gamification public!

This is a phenomenal opportunity to test your design skills, help children, and help the planet.

What is the background of this Food Heroes Design Challenge?

Here’s Peggy Liu to tell you about the challenge

Watch Video

We are so excited to see what you and other talented designers around the world come up with.

Maybe YOU will be helping kids eat healthier, helping the planet, and winning yourself a trip to Shanghai!

Want more info?

Go no further than this Q&A video hosted by Peggy Liu & Yu-kai Chou:

What are the Challenge Details?

Here’s a few slides describing the Challenge:

Are you sure there isn’t more information?

Good things come to those who ask!

Check out this Notion project and Dropbox link to see additional details shared by the JUCCCE team:

Food Heroes Challenge Assets
Notion Page with Project Details (and a video from David Nabarro!)

David Nabarro speaks about Food Heroes

Submit by:

Please send all submissions to Erik van Mechelen by December 20, 2019.

Interactive Learning Content at Professor Game

This blog post is contributed by Rob Alvarez, creator of Professor Game.

During my work at IE Business School Publishing, we regularly create interactive learning content. We have our own processes and ways of doing things, but today I want to talk about ways I’ve used of Octalysis to improve my designs. First, let me clarify that when I say design I’m specifically referring to learning experience design and gamification design.

As with any project, we have an ideation phase, where we come up with ideas on what to do and how to take the learning experience and results to the next level. During this phase, I’ve seen a significant improvement since I’ve been studying Octalysis and drawing from its ideas for projects. I’m not changing the whole internal process that we follow in our department, but rather using many of the things I’ve learned. As you might know, the Octalysis Strategy Dashboard offers five critical elements:

  1. Business Metrics, leading to Game Objectives
  2. Users, leading to Players
  3. Desired actions, leading to Win-States
  4. Feedback Mechanics, leading to Triggers
  5. Incentives, leading to Rewards

If you want more information on these, go to Yu-kai’s post on this topic, or, if you want to go deeper, read Actionable Gamification by the same author.

After completing the dashboard mentioned above for a project, Octalysis moves into the ideation phase. This is where the 8 core drives come in especially handy, and where I’ve found a lot of value in coming up with new ideas and balancing out the different motivations for our students. Often, you will see that towards the end of any regular ideation phase for the creation of a learning experience, even if you don’t follow the previous process it can be very useful to analyze your conclusions using the Octalysis lens, to figure out what core drives your idea is tapping more into. You might also want to reflect upon whether you also want to include other drives you might want to reinforce. It’s also useful to even take a step back and, if you haven’t taken a look at your user with the dashboard, to think about that person now, what are the main motivational drives present in this type of person and if you are using elements that tap into those main drives.

The more I use loose ideas from Octalysis, the more I realize how well they tie in together and how useful it can be to go through all the steps and phases. My daily work and discoveries in gamification have led me to get to know world-leading gamification gurus like Yu-kai Chou and other experts from around the world. All that I’ve learned and found useful led me on a journey to look for the best way to share my regular discoveries and applications of gamification in education with others. That’s how I’ve arrived to a new project, the creation of the Professor Game Podcast where I interview experts and practitioners to inspire teachers and professors to make their jobs even more amazing! If you want more information, look for it on iTunes or Stitcher, or go to professorgame.com.

Rob Alvarez Bucholska

@RobAlvarezB

This blog post is contributed by Rob Alvarez, creator of Professor Game.

Putting on Octalysis Glasses as an Educator in Hungary

Putting on your Octalysis glasses:

I spoke with Judit as part of our ongoing Hidden Gems podcast for Octalysis Prime, where we believe everyone has a story.

The reason I’m writing this post is for 2 reasons:

  1. My conversation with Judit inspired me
  2. The recording of our conversation was lost

Judit is a primary school teacher in Hungary, where she has taught young students through high school for 27 years.

She has studied and tried many methods of teaching. Kids change, she said, so you need to stay with them, or ahead of them if possible.

She experienced burnout last September and last summer.

Continue reading Putting on Octalysis Glasses as an Educator in Hungary