Cell phones are a huge distraction in the college classroom. But two Chico State students are trying to change that with a cell phone application they’ve created that rewards students for staying off their mobile devices.
The app is called Pocket Points. And the way it works is simple. You go to class, log into the app, lock your phone and you instantly start racking up points.
“And then those rewards get redeemed at local businesses like downtown, like Pita Pit, Woodstock’s, just a whole bunch of local businesses to get really good deals and I guess just great discounts around school,” says Rob Richardson, a Chico State junior computer science major and Pocket Points co-founder.
He said he thought up the idea to create the app during class one day, when he noticed everyone was on their phone.
“And the teacher had a rule of taking phones away and kind of trying to embarrass students if their phone rang or something like that, and that really reminds us of a negative reinforcement kind of a stick method rather than a carrot method,” Richardson said.
Richardson felt that negative reinforcement wasn’t working. So he teamed up with senior business marketing major Mitch Gardner to seek out a solution to the phone-in-class problem, and after a summer, they ended up with the Pocket Points app. It’s a solution that Gardner calls a win-win-win because not only do students and professors benefit, but so do businesses.
“That was something that was one of our main goals, was how can we make the business happy?” Gardner says. “And the way to make the business happy is just increase foot traffic in their door. And if we can bring in hundreds of students to these small businesses then everyone’s winning.”
Pocket Points was launched in September and currently has about 150 participating businesses and more than 20,000 active users across 10 U.S. universities.