SNAG: Using Social Networking Games to Increase Student Retention in Computer Science

One of the primary goals of attending academic conferences is professional networking, yet even though this interaction can increase one's feeling of community within a field, conference attendees are not interacting as much as they could be. Similarly, it's known that students who do not feel as if they are part of a larger academic community are less likely to participate in extracurricular activities and organizations, lowering retention rates. To combat both of these problems, we present SNAG (Social Networking and Games). SNAG is a suite of mobile and Internet games which aim to facilitate social networking between members of a group, and can be used in either a conference setting or within a university. This paper focuses on one specific game, Snag'em, and discusses our evaluation for our SNAG games.