The MITRE Corporation is a not-for-profit organization that operates research and development centers sponsored by the federal government. MITRE’s research supports various institutions such as the Department of Defense, the FAA, the IRS, and the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts among others. During my time at MITRE I worked in Corporate developing and implementing collaborative solutions that would be of use to the organization.

My primary responsibility was to evaluate the effectiveness of gamification techniques and determine how best to implement them in MITRE’s framework. For a while this involved researching various gamification practices and current gamification platforms being offered on the market. Further on during my internship news arrived that MITRE’s internal search engine which it utilized to gather employee information and internal research documents and files was switching from a Google-based one to one based around FAST. A question then arose, “How do we train employees to effectively be able to use this new search engine?”

Eventually we decided on building a web browser game in which employees were evaluated on how quickly and accurately they could answer a series of questions which often required them to know best practices for using the new search engine. The first iteration tracked their daily score, best daily score, cumulative score, and other statistics such as correct answer streak in a leader board which players could use to compete with friends. I led the project with a team of four fellow interns in developing this project. I designed the layout and workflow of the application from how questions and information was stored on the server to how it was displayed and interacted with by the user. In general, I handled most of the front-end, client-side design and aspects of the project.

At MITRE I used:

• HTML5
• Javascript
• PHP