MCC Plusz: a gamified learning app

MCC needed a new app for its talent programme. Mathias Corvinus Collegium is a Budapest institution whose free talent programmes are open to everyone from upper primary school to adulthood. Anyone who joins studies through the app, so it has to carry the learning content as well as the news and events.

The institution already had an app, and it was not working well. Our goal was an app students open by choice: one place to learn, follow MCC news and see what is coming up, with a reason to come back after every session.

Our role, from first sketch to system operation

MCC asked us to develop an application. We took on the whole product: the first idea and sketches, product design, the React Native app, a custom CMS, development, and the monthly support and system operation that keep it running. Sketching started on 23 December 2023 and the app went live in spring 2024.

MCC came with its own ideas for gamification. We advised on which mechanics hold people's attention, based on what we had learned on earlier products, and we have kept adding new gamified elements since launch.

How MCC Plusz works

• Learning: podcasts, videos and quizzes, with progress tracked in real time.

• News and events: what is happening at MCC and what is coming up.

• Stars: earned for quizzes, challenges and activities.

• The shop: students spend their stars on items inside the app.

• Motivation: streaks, badges, progress bars and leaderboards.

• Behind the app: a custom CMS, hosted on-premise and operated by us.

Three decisions that shaped the app

Balancing the star economy

The least obvious work was the economy: how many stars each activity earns and what each item in the shop costs. We think a reward only motivates when it can be spent and takes some effort to earn, so we designed star income and shop prices together, as one system.

A custom CMS instead of an off-the-shelf one

Off-the-shelf content systems could not be customised as far as MCC needed, so we built one for the app. The cost of that choice is that the CMS is ours to maintain, which we do under the monthly support.

On-premise hosting instead of the cloud

We weighed cloud hosting against an on-premise setup, and on-premise proved the better fit for MCC. We run the system ourselves as part of the support.

The figures below come from the app analytics and the admin panel.