A Serious Games Development Environment

Un ambiente per lo sviluppo di Serious Game

Using gaming paratexts in the literacy classroom

This paper illustrates how digital game paratexts may effectively be used in the high school English to meet a variety of traditional and multimodal literacy outcomes. Paratexts are texts that refer to digital gaming and game cultures, and using them in the classroom enables practitioners to focus on and valorise the considerable literacies and skills that young people develop and deploy in their engagement with digital gaming and game cultures. The effectiveness of valorizing paratexts in this manner is demonstrated through two examples of assessment by students in classes where teachers had designed curriculum and assessment activities using paratexts

Developments of serious games in education

As Human Computer Interaction technologies evolve, they are supporting the generation of innovative solutions in a broad range of domains. Among them, Serious Games are defined as new type of computer game that is capable of stimulating users to learn, by playing and competing against themselves, against other users or against a computer application. While it could be applied to a broad range of fields and ages, these games are becoming especially relevant in educational contexts and for the most recent generation of students that is growing in a new technological environment, very different from the one we had some years ago. However, in order to become fully accepted as a teaching/learning tool in both formal and informal contexts, this technology has still to overcome several challenges. Given these considerations, this chapter makes a state-of-the-art review of several works that were done in this field, followed by the description of two real world projects, helping to understand the applicability of this technology, but also its inherent challenges.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Games for and by Teachers and Learners

With the advent of social media it is widely accepted that teachers and learners are not only consumers but also may have an active role in contributing and co-creating lesson materials and content. Paradoxically one strand of technology enhanced learning, i.e. game-based learning, aligns only slightly to this development. Games while there to experience, explore and collaborate are almost exclusively designed by professionals. Despite, or maybe because, games are the exclusive domain of professional developers, the general impression is that games require complex technologies and that games are difficult to organise and to embed in a curriculum. This chapter will make a case that games are not necessarily the exclusive domain of game professionals. Rather than enforcing teachers to get acquainted with and use complex, technically demanding games, we will discuss approaches that teachers themselves can use to build games, make use of existing games and even one step beyond use tools or games that can be used by learners to create their own designs, e.g. games or virtual worlds

Keep it simple : Lowering the Barrier for Authoring Serious Games

Background. Despite the continuous and abundant growth of the game market the uptake of serious games in education has been limited. Games require complex technologies and are difficult to organise and to embed in the curriculum. Aim. This article explores to what extent game templates and game authoring processes can be designed that can be easily adopted and adapted by teachers while only using openly available tools. Method. It discusses the design and first evaluation of two game platforms: ARGUMENT, based on a wiki, and ARLEARN, a toolkit based on openly available Google technologies. ARGUMENT is a text-based game challenging students to take a position on a given topic. ARLEARN offers an explicit mobile and virtual gameplay environment and a defined authoring process to create game scripts. Results. ARGUMENT and ARLEARN have been evaluated in four small-scale studies, where educators designed game scenarios and students played the resulting games. Conclusions. The results indicate that both tools are useful instruments that can be operated by teachers to build games and game-alike educational activities and, additionally, are a valuable step to gain experience with serious games.SURFnet/Kennisnet (ARGUMENT, StreetLearn, ARLearn), UNHC

Responsible research and innovation in science education: insights from evaluating the impact of using digital media and arts-based methods on RRI values

The European Commission policy approach of Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) is gaining momentum in European research planning and development as a strategy to align scientific and technological progress with socially desirable and acceptable ends. One of the RRI agendas is science education, aiming to foster future generations' acquisition of skills and values needed to engage in society responsibly. To this end, it is argued that RRI-based science education can benefit from more interdisciplinary methods such as those based on arts and digital technologies. However, the evidence existing on the impact of science education activities using digital media and arts-based methods on RRI values remains underexplored. This article comparatively reviews previous evidence on the evaluation of these activities, from primary to higher education, to examine whether and how RRI-related learning outcomes are evaluated and how these activities impact on students' learning. Forty academic publications were selected and its content analysed according to five RRI values: creative and critical thinking, engagement, inclusiveness, gender equality and integration of ethical issues. When evaluating the impact of digital and arts-based methods in science education activities, creative and critical thinking, engagement and partly inclusiveness are the RRI values mainly addressed. In contrast, gender equality and ethics integration are neglected. Digital-based methods seem to be more focused on students' questioning and inquiry skills, whereas those using arts often examine imagination, curiosity and autonomy. Differences in the evaluation focus between studies on digital media and those on arts partly explain differences in their impact on RRI values, but also result in non-documented outcomes and undermine their potential. Further developments in interdisciplinary approaches to science education following the RRI policy agenda should reinforce the design of the activities as well as procedural aspects of the evaluation research

Games, Simulations, Immersive Environments, and Emerging Technologies

International audienceThis entry presents an overview of advanced technologies to support teaching and learning. The use of innovative interactive systems for education has never been higher. Far from being just a trend, the objective is to use the current technology to cover educational needs and create relevant pedagogical situations. The arguments in their favor are generally their positive effects on learners’ motivation and the necessity to provide learning methods adapted to our growing digital culture. The new learning technologies and emerging trends are first reviewed hereunder. We thus define and discuss learning games, gamification, simulation, immersive environments and other emerging technologies. Then, the current limits and remaining scientific challenges are highlighted

Integrating serious games in adaptive hypermedia applications for personalised learning experiences

Game-based approaches to learning are increasingly recognized for their potential to stimulate intrinsic motivation amongst learners. While a range of examples of effective serious games exist, creating high-fidelity content with which to populate games is resource-intensive task. To reduce this resource requirement, research is increasingly exploring means to reuse and repurpose existing games. Education has proven a popular application area for Adaptive Hypermedia (AH), as adaptation can offer enriched learning experiences. Whilst content has mainly been in the form of rich text, various efforts have been made to integrate serious games into AH. However, there is little in the way of effective integrated authoring and user modeling support. This paper explores avenues for effectively integrating serious games into AH. In particular, we consider authoring and user modeling aspects in addition to integration into run-time adaptation engines, thereby enabling authors to create AH that includes an adaptive game, thus going beyond mere selection of a suitable game and towards an approach with the capability to adapt and respond to the needs of learners and educators