Hamline GO, inspired by the viral mobile game Pokémon GO, made its debut at the beginning of this school year with the goal to provide students with a unique way to interact with both their professors and campus.
Interim provost Dr. Andy Rundquist released Hamline GO in late August through the app AppSheet. Rundquist describes the inspiration for the app, “How can we think of a game – for lack of a better word – that could incentivize students to do the things that we think would really make this campus better, and their own education better.”
Much like Pokémon Go, users are given daily tasks on top of codes required to “catch” staff members, which requires Pipers to ask professors for their codes to be able to catch the professors and gain points.
“It’s way better for you to talk to somebody than to just collect them randomly on the map,” Rundquist said.
This aspect of the app provides students with a reason to talk to their professors. One of the app’s top users, junior Ashley Wilson said through email, “I’ve done this a few times, and I felt as though it gave me the courage to talk to some of my professors, as I am typically a more quiet student.”
The challenges on the app are a fairly new addition to the game. “Most days and most weeks, there’s a challenge that can range from ‘take a picture of the Bishop’ to ‘collect two people on the map and tell what kind of class you’d like them to co-teach’, to ‘find somebody on the map and write a haiku using their full name,’” Rundquist said.
Although the audience currently using Hamline GO is only around 50 students, Hamline’s staff hope that the app’s fun and quirky tasks will appeal to a larger group of students and get more people involved on campus and having face-to-face interactions with their professors.
Rundquist and others are currently incentivizing using the app with the occasional set of prizes. At the end of September, the top seven users on the app were awarded either additional declining balance or Starbucks gift cards.
These prizes are what got many of the app’s current users to join. The current leader in points, first-year Laura Snow, shared through email why they started playing.
“I thought the free Starbucks my friend won was awesome and wanted to try. I mostly just thought it would be really funny to see how many points I could get,” Snow said.
There are great aspirations for the future of Hamline GO.
“We’re excited about building more of a life of the mind on campus,” Rundquist said. “We want as many students as possible to have an opportunity to really build community and to have that life of the mind aspect of it.”
In addition to the community and intellectual goals of the app, fun is a huge part of Hamline GO.
“It’s fun for a university to have quirky traditions,” Rundquist said. “To me, if five years from now, one of my super-users who got fifty bucks tells that story… to me that’s a win, because it endears that person to Hamline.”
It seems like even within a few months of its release, Hamline GO is already starting that quirky tradition. While the future of Hamline GO is unknown, Pipers can be sure they will have a fun story to tell their friends about Hamline down the line.
