Empowering students to take ownership of their learning is a central goal in higher education, yet many service-learning and research projects still operate under rigid structures that limit autonomy and initiative. When participation is framed mainly as compliance for credit hours, engagement and creativity often decline. To foster genuine ownership, we adopted gamification as a methodology to redistribute control of planning, coordination, and evaluation toward students themselves. Within the SKILIKET Living Lab - an interdisciplinary ecosystem for socio-ecological innovation - seventy-eight students were distributed into active teams to design and carry out weekly missions addressing real challenges. Using messaging and collaboration platforms, they managed points, levels, and leaderboards, while ambassadors and mentors provided validation and feedback. This hybrid collaborative environment empowered students to design, launch, and refine their own activities, resulting in greater leadership, cooperation, and sustained motivation. The experience also informed the flow diagrams and interaction logic for a forthcoming mobile app that will extend this participatory model.
