Abstract
Improving Digital Wellbeing with and for Teens: A Gamified and Personalized Intelligent System (DIGI-Teens) addresses the growing societal and educational challenge of promoting a more conscious and balanced use of digital technologies among adolescents. While existing technological solutions for digital wellbeing primarily rely on self-monitoring, timers, and restriction mechanisms, recent research suggests that sustainable digital wellbeing requires educational approaches that foster awareness, reflection, and personal growth. In response, DIGI-Teens aimed to design, implement, and evaluate a novel web-based gamified platform to support digital wellbeing education in schools and other educational contexts. Grounded in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), participatory design, gamification, End-User Development (EUD), and Artificial Intelligence (AI), the project investigated the following research question: Can a gamified intelligent platform co-designed with and for teens improve digital wellbeing through learning paths defined by teachers? To answer this question, the project adopted a co-design approach involving key stakeholders: high-school students aged 16–18, teachers, educators, and researchers. Through literature analysis, teacher surveys, and co-design activities conducted with Italian high schools, the project elicited requirements, needs, values, and practices related to digital wellbeing education. The resulting platform enables teachers and educators to create and personalise gamified learning paths on digital wellbeing, while students engage with educational activities through a dedicated mobile application. The system combines reflective exercises, self-assessment tools, gamification mechanisms, and personalised interactions, adapting educational experiences to both the learning context and teachers’ pedagogical goals. A teacher-oriented web application and a student-oriented mobile application were developed and integrated through shared data and synchronisation mechanisms. The platform was evaluated through a multi-stage process including both formative and summative assessments. An initial in-the-lab evaluation examined usability, appropriateness, and user experience, informing subsequent refinements to the platform. A final in-the-wild evaluation was conducted with high-school students in authentic educational settings. Results positively confirmed the potential of the DIGI-Teens platform to promote awareness and reflection on smartphone use among teenagers. Findings indicate that the combination of reflective activities, gamified learning experiences, self-assessment instruments, and teacher-driven personalisation can effectively support digital wellbeing education. The evaluations also generated design implications, best practices, and guidelines for future digital wellbeing educational systems. The project achieved three major outcomes. First, it produced a fully functional proof-of-concept platform for digital wellbeing education, co-designed, implemented, and evaluated in collaboration with local high schools, and released as open-source software under an Apache 2.0 licence. Second, it delivered comprehensive formative and summative evaluations demonstrating the feasibility and educational value of the proposed approach. Third, it generated a set of design guidelines, paradigms, and lessons learned for the development of gamified and personalised educational tools supporting digital wellbeing. Beyond its research contributions, DIGI-Teens fostered an active scientific and practitioner community around digital wellbeing for teenagers. Dissemination activities included a dedicated project website, open-source repositories, the organisation of an international workshop on Digital Wellbeing for Teens: Designing Educational Systems at AVI 2024, publications at leading HCI venues including ACM CHI 2025, participation in the European Night of Researchers, and the guest editing of a special issue on digital wellbeing education. Overall, the project demonstrates how participatory design, gamification, personalisation, and intelligent technologies can be effectively combined to support digital wellbeing education, providing both a validated technological solution and a foundation for future research and practice in this increasingly critical area.
Project details
Unibo Team Leader: Catia Prandi
Unibo involved Department/s:
Dipartimento di Informatica - Scienza e Ingegneria
Coordinator:
Politecnico di TORINO(Italy)
Total Unibo Contribution: Euro (EUR) 75.827,00
Project Duration in months: 29
Start Date:
28/09/2023
End Date:
28/02/2026
