App of the Week: Mastery

According to Canadian writer Malcolm Gladwell, it takes the average person 10,000 hours to become an expert at a given skill. Despite the fact that’s a relatively small number when compared to all the hours in a person’s life, most people get discouraged when they realize how much failure and repetition is involved in mastering something.

Mastery, a new app by solo developer Mihail Burduja aims to make a game of learning new things by, well, gamifying the process.

Sure, gamification is a tired trick at this point, but Mastery does a job of facilitating the process by allowing the user to choose how to reward themselves. For example, you can set the app so that your reward for spending two hours learning a new language is 30 minutes of TV. It’s still up to the user to enforce the behaviour, but seeing that hour count go up definitely makes it easier.

Mastery is available for free on the Google Play Store.  Check it out.