Recruitment Rush: A Boardgame to Teach Students About Recruiting Participants for a User Experience Study

Authentic student projects in higher education reflect plausible real-world scenarios, connecting the curriculum to students’ future careers. In Human–Computer Interaction, this is realised through focus on real-world design and evaluation problems, which offer similar challenges to those found in industry settings. A limitation, however, is seen in the teaching of participant recruitment, with students typically choosing convenience samples of friends and family as their research participants rather than developing a balanced and budget-conscious recruitment strategy. This paper presents Recruitment Rush, a boardgame designed specifically to meet this challenge, presenting a meaningful real-world recruitment scenario that can be played in under an hour to stimulate understanding of how to recruit participants for a study. Evaluation of the game with 95 students and academics shows that the game is engaging and invites conversation and reflection on the nature of participant recruitment even beyond the direct HCI context.