Games and Learning Alliance

Beyond quizzes, cold simulations, and educational content placed inside non-meaningful games, serious games are evolving and becoming a more mature class of artefacts.

This paper describes a pilot deployment in lower secondary school of a serious game dedicated to the learning of history. The primary aim of the initiative was to investigate the integration of Serious Games-based learning environments in the school study of humanities subjects. The pilot was carried out as part of investigations that researchers in the Games and Learning Alliance (GALA) Network of Excellence are conducting into the adoption and deployment of Serious Games (SG) in formal learning contexts. In this regard, the paper outlines the sequence of deployed pilot activities, which was shaped with the intention of responding to the needs of all the participants involved – researchers, educators and learners. This approach is inspired by the principles of design-based research, as illustrated in the strategies adopted both for piloting activities and data gathering. The paper reports the outcome of these and considers some implications of the adopted approach both for SG deployment in formal education and for implementation of experimental SG pilots of this kind.

The challenge of delivering personalized learning experiences in a large class, and through groups or teams, is an undertaking fraught with difficulties. Yet it is a necessary experience for engineering education since engineering in the real world are team-based events that build from individual knowledge. This paper reports on the learning of supply chain management (SCM), a fundamental component in engineering manufacturing operations and logistics planning. The study investigates the use of SHORTFALL a team-based game in conjunction with various degrees of facilitation, supported with taught material. Early results from two separate and independent studies indicate that the usefulness of using SHORTFALL in classes regarding the students’ experience and learning outcomes depends on the prior knowledge of the students as well as on the use of an expert facilitator.

Nowadays, English is a global language taught as a second language in most of non-English speaking countries. Over recent decades, Computer Assisted Language Learning (CALL) has evolved into solutions that allow a higher learner engagement in authentic active-based learning activities. In this context, the educational digital games, also known as Serious Games (SG), allow learning English as a Second Language (ESL) in a playful and engaging environment. In this study, we develop a literature review on the current uses of SG in the context of CALL, in general, and ESL, specifically, in order to create a taxonomy of pedagogical uses of SG for ESL. The taxonomy could be of utility for teachers aiming to integrate SG in their ESL courses.

The paper presents the InTouch project and discusses design principles and implementation of serious mobile games for the development of soft skills for SME professionals. 30 serious games for mobile devices were developed to be tested and evaluated during Learning labs participated by SMEs professionals operating in different business sectors from seven European countries. The games describe situational learning cases related to 10 non-routine skills, and use different types of interactions. Usability study findings together with qualitative results emerging from Learning labs are described, showing an overall positive evaluation deriving for the choice of the serious game approach and the use of mobile devices.

Serious games offer the potential to not only entertain and educate, but can also operate as a diagnostic tool. While designing a game with the goal of a diagnostic tool, we faced many challenges. In this paper, we share our experiences in dealing with these challenges in the iterations of designing, implementing, and evaluating such a tool.

In the academic debate on smart city definition, the “human” part of the city is gaining a prominent position as a decisive factor in good city policies. So, Public Administrations (PAs) are looking for the citizen involvement in the decision-making processes, in order to create products and services really meeting the city needs. In this context, gamification principles are more and more employed as facilitator of the citizen engagement process. In this paper, we intend to show the main findings of our analysis on the literary review about application of gamification principles in the smart city context, providing some considerations about their possible application in public policies co-design.

The challenge of delivering personalized learning experiences is amplified by the size of classrooms and of online learning communities. In turn, serious games are increasingly recognized for their potential to improve education, but a typical requirement from instructors is to gain insight into how the students are playing. When we bring games into the rapidly growing online learning communities, the challenges multiply and hinder the potential effectiveness of serious games. There is a need to deliver a comprehensive, flexible and intelligent learning framework that facilitates better understanding of learners’ knowledge, effective assessment of their progress and continuous evaluation and optimization of the environments in which they learn. This paper aims to explore the potential in the use of games and learning analytics towards scaffolding and supporting teaching and learning experience. The conceptual model discussed aims to highlight key considerations that may advance the current state of learning analytics, adaptive learning and serious games, by leveraging serious games as an ideal medium for gathering data and performing adaptations. This opportunity has the potential to affect the design and deployment of education and training in the future.

This paper introduces the integration of the face emotion recognition part and the voice emotion recognition part of our FILTWAM framework that uses webcams and microphones. This framework enables real-time multimodal emotion recognition of learners during game-based learning for triggering feedback towards improved learning. The main goal of this study is to validate the integration of webcam and microphone data for a real-time and adequate interpretation of facial and vocal expressions into emotional states where the software modules are calibrated with end users. This integration aims to improve timely and relevant feedback, which is expected to increase learners’ awareness of their own behavior. Twelve test persons received the same computer-based tasks in which they were requested to mimic specific facial and vocal expressions. Each test person mimicked 80 emotions, which led to a dataset of 960 emotions. All sessions were recorded on video. An overall accuracy of Kappa value based on the requested emotions, expert opinions, and the recognized emotions is 0.61, of the face emotion recognition software is 0.76, and of the voice emotion recognition software is 0.58. A multimodal fusion between the software modules can increase the accuracy to 78 %. In contrast with existing software our software modules allow real-time, continuously and unobtrusively monitoring of learners’ face expressions and voice intonations and convert these into emotional states. This inclusion of learner’s emotional states paves the way for more effective, efficient and enjoyable game-based learning.

Curriculum integration is one of the main factors in the teachers’ decision-making process when deciding to use games in formal educational contexts. Based on this observation, we aim to provide primary education teachers with a selection of (serious) games in each of the main areas of the primary education curriculum in Quebec. The taxonomy of the games selected includes Serious Games (SG), designed for educational purposes from the start, but also repurposed games, which, despite not having being intentionally designed for educational purposes, could be diverted for meeting the curriculum objectives of primary education.

Working memory training systems are designed to improve the user’s working memory. However, current systems are frequently considered tedious deeply affecting the user’s motivation and consequently the potential for training derived improvements. “Free Your Brain” is a brain training game combining insights from cognitive neuropsychological theories and flow theories. In this work we describe the game and its design process specifically establishing the link between the supporting theoretical background research and the developed solution.

Instruction, in several knowledge domains, aims at achieving two goals: acquisition of a body of knowledge and of problem solving skills in the field. In physics, this requires students to connect physical phenomena, physics principles, and physics symbols. This can be learned on paper, but interactive tools may increase the learner’s ability to contextualize the problem. Computer simulations provide students with graphical models that join phenomena and principles in physics. However, a minimally guided approach may make learning difficult, since it overburdens the working memory. In particular, for developing problem solving skills, students need to be guided and exercise with a variety of physics problems. Intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) can be a useful tool to fill this gap. Thus, we have developed a physics game to support inquiry learning and retrieval practicing using simulation and knowledge based tutorship (QTut), and implemented as a puzzle game that uses driving questions to encourage students to explore the simulation. To address scalability and reusability, the game features different difficulty levels atop of a customizable format. This allows us to explore in-game adaptivity, exploiting task and user models that rely on the flow framework. User tests are being executed to evaluate the usefulness of the game.

In this paper we present the therapeutical social network MindBook. MindBook is a web page designed to strengthen the self-esteem of children with depression, and show them that a positive self-expression causes positive feedback from friends in the social network. Depression therapy follows the Modular Approach to Therapy for Children with Anxiety, Depression, Trauma or Conduct Problems (MATCH-ADTC), including videos, audio and images to be consumed by the children. MindBook also includes additional features like games and a week planner to help the children to include real life activities into their daily lives. We present the results of two studies including children from different age groups, for evaluating the effect of MindBook on children and the system usability.

Gamification is the use of game elements in non-game environment. One element among others is avatar. The use of avatar in the context of learning can make students to feel themselves more safe and relaxed. It can lead to the more active participation and to immersion. To find out what is the effect of using avatars in education, several courses were designed like games, and feedback information was collected It was found that implementation of avatars was useful for creating anonymous scoreboards, however it did not had any strong effect on immersion. For better results avatar should be combined with other game elements e.g. story.

Research in Serious Games (SG), as a whole, faces two main challenges in understanding the transition between the instructional design and actual game design implementation and documenting an evidence-based mapping of game design patterns onto relevant pedagogical patterns. From a practical perspective, this transition lacks methodology and requires a leap of faith from a prospective customer in the ability of a SG developer to deliver a game that will achieve the desired learning outcomes. A series of workshops were thus conducted to present and apply a preliminary exposition though a purpose-processing methodology to probe various SG design aspects, in particular how serious game design patterns map with pedagogical practices. The objective was to encourage dialogue and debate on core assumptions and emerging challenges to help develop robust methods and strategies to better SG design and its interconnectedness with pedagogy.