A Game-based Approach for Open Data in Education:A Systematic Mapping Review

Abstract Open Data is defined as digital data that is made available with the technical and legal characteristics necessary to be freely used, reused, and redistributed by anyone, anytime and anywhere. Examples of Open Data can be data on mobility or pollution, which an increasing number of cities are making available to citizens. In education, the novel field of Open Data has the potential of empowering a young generation with digital skills and critical thinking through work with real-life Open Data. However, the scarcity of methods and tools for skills development and insertion into educational designs reduces the possibility of achieving this potential. This study is part of the project ODECO, aimed at addressing challenges in the creation of Open Data ecosystems in several contexts, such as education. A systematic mapping review was conducted to uncover the research connections between Open Data education and educational games. Twenty-eight studies were identified and analysed through iterative searching and including keywords related to Gamification, Open Data and Education. In doing this, relevant themes and novel approaches in the current literature were found. This paper discusses how the fields of Open Data education and educational games methodologically and theoretically contribute to outline a game-based approach for Open Data in education. An Open Data Gamified Education Framework leads to authentic learning experiences for real-world problem solving in relation to eight actions: connecting classroom activities to real facts, empowering students to act with Open Data, supporting technical Open Data skills in the classroom, building literacy and developing skills, enhancing civic participation, creating more realistic and appealing narratives, extending teaching outside the classroom by collecting data in real time and local settings, and increasing engagement and motivation. Acknowledgments. This study is funded by the ODECO Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network (H2020-MSCA-ITN-2020, grant agreement 955569), which aims at addressing challenges in the creation of user driven, circular, skill-based, and inclusive Open Data ecosystems (ODECO - Towards a Sustainable Open Data ECOsystem, 2021)

The Gamification of Crowdsourcing Systems: Empirical Investigations and Design

Recent developments in modern information and communication technologies have spawned two rising phenomena, gamification and crowdsourcing, which are increasingly being combined into gamified crowdsourcing systems. While a growing number of organizations employ crowdsourcing as a way to outsource tasks related to the inventing, producing, funding, or distributing of their products and services to the crowd – a large group of people reachable via the internet – crowdsourcing initiatives become enriched with design features from games to motivate the crowd to participate in these efforts. From a practical perspective, this combination seems intuitively appealing, since using gamification in crowdsourcing systems promises to increase motivations, participation and output quality, as well as to replace traditionally used financial incentives. However, people in large groups all have individual interests and motivations, which makes it complex to design gamification approaches for crowds. Further, crowdsourcing systems exist in various forms and are used for various tasks and problems, thus requiring different incentive mechanisms for different crowdsourcing types. The lack of a coherent understanding of the different facets of gamified crowdsourcing systems and the lack of knowledge about the motivational and behavioral effects of applying various types of gamification features in different crowdsourcing systems inhibit us from designing solutions that harness gamification’s full potential. Further, previous research canonically uses competitive gamification, although crowdsourcing systems often strive to produce cooperative outcomes. However, the potentially relevant field of cooperative gamification has to date barely been explored. With a specific focus on these shortcomings, this dissertation presents several studies to advance the understanding of using gamification in crowdsourcing systems