Improving Differentiated Digital Game-Based Learning

ABSTRACT Purpose. This paper will explore the implementation of digital game-based learning, while also specifically engaging in performance-based differentiation of digital game-based learning activities to align with student assessment data. Background. Over the course of the study the aim is to clarify implementation and use of digital game-based learning and come to a better understanding of which games students enjoy and why they enjoy them. The research will explore ways that the educator provides differentiated and personalized instruction to students to offset the increases in class size and increased access to digital tools within the classroom. The overview of the literature review will recognize that digital resources, including those for gaming, are widely available to teachers and have provided effective interventions to address learners’ individual needs. Student interaction with technology is ever-increasing, and methods to engage student learning mandate an examination of varied digital teaching techniques. Digital game-based learning, differentiation, and data application all play a role in the method. The nature of digital game-based learning – its level-based scaffolding, the reduced impact of failure on student achievement, the ability for the teacher to design different games for different needs – all lend to its increased use as an instructional modality

Insights on lean gamifications for higher education

Purpose There is no argument that using games (gamification) is an efficient way of learning in higher education. The questions, though, are which gamification approach is most suitable at that level and how to assess its suitability? This paper aims to attempt to partially answer these two questions, in the context of lean thinking education. Design/methodology/approach The paper offers an assessment criteria to investigate the impact of lean gamification based on the evaluation of motivational, cognitive and social processing during games. In addition, a study is conducted among selected games using these assessment criteria. The study included statistical as well as comparative analysis. The study was based on a sample of undergraduate students learning various lean thinking concepts through physical games over the course of six months. Findings Results showed different interaction levels between the three evaluation criteria depending on the type and design of the lean game. The reported scores and analysis drew various lessons on how to use gamification in the context of lean teaching, outlined some best practices in lean games design and suggested recommendations in mapping lean games from industrial domain to higher education domain. Research limitations/implications The scope of this research was bounded by the sample size of students as well as the selected nine lean thinking games. Larger pool of students as well as other lean thinking games can offer further insights and confirm the outlined ones. Practical implications The presented work will help lean thinking educators in higher education to better understand the student dynamics associated with engaging them in this type pf pedagogical approach. It will help guiding lean thinking games’ designer on how to better cater for this segment of lean thinking learners. Finally, it will aid in promoting lean gamification as an effective learning tool. Social implications The social impact is achieved through enhancing lean thinking education to a wide number of students. This will positively impact the society through the application of the effective lean tools at different stages, levels and places in these students’ life experiences. Originality/value This study offers one of the very few applications in gamification assessment in the context of lean thinking. Furthermore, it integrates the social processing criterion for the first time with the classical two other criteria (motivation and cognitive) used in games education assessment. Finally, it offers new insights for lean thinking game designers for higher education learners

Building a Better Game: A Theory of Gameful Learning & the Construction of Student Personas with Agency

Gameful course design creates learning environments that support student motivation, drawing inspiration from well-designed games. This dissertation establishes the theoretical framework on which gameful pedagogy is founded. One key piece of gameful course design is that the instructor creates opportunities for students to make decisions about how they will complete course work. Designing these opportunities requires instructors to reflect on how different types of students are likely to behave, and to decide what grade outcomes can be earned through different routes of action. The field of Human-Computer Interaction uses a design tool called personas to help software developers better understand target users and their respective goals as they build new technologies. This dissertation investigates what choices students made within a gameful course, with the intention of developing a method to systematically construct student personas, based on a combination of behavioral, performance, demographic, and psycho-social data. Such personas would ideally enable instructors to more finely tune gameful course structures to student needs. While this research succeeded in establishing a method to describe the pathways students took through the gameful course studied, it identified very little commonality in students’ choices at the assignment level: the 159 students studied took 158 unique pathways through the core assignment work. This finding speaks to the success of gameful course design in enabling students to have autonomy over their learning experience, but, in addition to a general lack of significant findings between basic student characteristics and assignment choice, did not allow for the creation of data-driven personas that felt cohesive and representative of the students they represented. Three goals for future research into data-driven personas are identified: First, to confirm in a larger and more diverse context that the characteristics examined in this study do not have strong relationships to assignment choice. Second, to re-evaluate whether characteristics like ethnicity and gender need to be included in learner personas at all if they do not offer a better understanding of how similar learners are likely to behave. And third, to investigate whether it is more valuable to iterative course design to focus on how different behavior patterns relate to each and impact each other rather than assuming that the patterns themselves will relate to any particular learner characteristic.PHDInformationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/144070/1/cholma_1.pd

Peli Alkaa : fantasia-aiheinen pakohuonepeli oppimisympäristönä Englanti vieraana kielenä opetuksessa

My thesis discusses the use of a fantasy-themed escape room as a learning environment for English as a foreign language classroom. Games, especially roleplaying games, have been the target of many studies and they have been shown to increase motivation, create new language scenarios and contexts as well as promote interaction between students and the gaming environment. However, the digital educational gaming industry in Finland is in its infancy. My study centers around piloting a digital fantasy-themed escape room called “The Mage’s Hut”, and this material package functions as the revision material for the course. I set to answer four research questions. The main goal is to find out how well a fantasy themed escape room functions as a learning environment. Secondly, I examine the attitudes of students and the teacher towards the game. Lastly, the fourth research question intends to answer how students’ previous gaming habits affect the gaming experience. I use relevant contemporary literature to examine gaming trends among Finnish upper secondary school students as well as delve deeper into the benefits of gamification used in formal contexts. This includes literature on roleplaying games as well as escape rooms and their utilization in formal educational contexts. The research design includes a digital fantasy-themed escape room that I have created based on the course material provided by Insights 5 -book by Otava for ENA5 course. The participants of the study included 26 Finnish upper secondary schoolers and their teacher. To gather the data, two questionnaires were constructed – one for students and one for the teacher. Twenty of the students responded to the questionnaire. The method for the study includes both qualitative and quantitative aspects. The questionnaires were analyzed by close-reading and were transformed into numerical values providing an easy way to compare results with each other. The results indicate that the attitudes of the students as well as the teacher towards the game are positive. The teacher and most of the students enjoyed playing the game and would like to see more similar games utilized in education. The game was deemed to be quite challenging, but it did not seem to negatively affect the game’s enjoyability or reported development of skills. These skills included vocabulary, grammar, reading comprehension, teamwork, information retrieval, logical and critical thinking. On the contrary, the students who deemed the game to be quite challenging reported more skills developed overall. The gaming habits of the students influenced the results partly. The students were categorized to non-gamers, casual gamers, active gamers, and hardcore gamers. Casual gamers, those with one to five hours of game time per week, reported developing the most skills out of all other groups. On the other hand, casual gamers reported the game as quite challenging the most. Therefore, it is not certain whether it is the difficulty or the game time that facilitates the development of the skills. Even though the majority of all groups reported enjoying the game, casual gamers reported the highest enjoyment rate. What we can gather from this study is that digital fantasy-themed escape rooms function well as a learning environment. The game corresponds to the learning objectives set by the Finnish curriculum and the teacher. Furthermore, the students felt that learning took place while playing the game. Both aspects of the game, the fantasy theme and the mechanics of an escape room were enjoyed, further reinforcing the previous knowledge on the functionality of roleplaying games in formal educational contexts

Games-Based Online Course Design: Prototype of Gamification for Online Tutors

With the ubiquity of interactive games in students’ lives and the rise of gamified experiences across the web and mobile applications, online tutors and practitioners of technology enhanced learning have been inspired to incorporate games-based elements. This paper introduces a prototype of an online application that helps online tutors to embed gaming to design their online course. We developed a framework for online course leaders which explains how Wikis (as an online learning platform) can support students’ learning, interaction, and sharing of knowledge in the online community. We are presenting a metaphor for the course design in a gameboard like “snakes and ladders”. This metaphoric game enables online tutors to elaborate online interaction among their students. The game methodological design approach for this metaphoric game merges different pedagogical theories such as (socio-constructivism) with practice in online learning (Wiki) and gives the online tutor an idea about what theory/approach is used when selecting any technological tool or moving forward in the game. This framework could help tutors, educational institutions and students to use a common language with students to describe their teaching and learning activities. Primarily, it helps tutors to make decisions about learning activities, facilitate, guide and support students’ communication and collaboration

3D online spaces for teacher education: mapping the territory

[Abstract]: If familiarity with games played out in 3D online spaces is truly a defining characteristic of the emerging generations of learners then teacher educators need to attend to these environments both as venues for teacher preparation and as a subject of study for preparing teachers who will be expected to work in such environments. As an aid to investigating possible applications of 3D online spaces in teacher education some means of mapping out the territory to be explored is desirable. This paper proposes one such map and suggests examples of applications that might be explored various areas of the map

Student interactions in online discussion forums: their perception on learning with business simulation games

Digital technology offers new teaching methods with controversial results over learning. They allow students to develop a more active participation in their learning process although it does not always drive to unequivocal better learning outcomes. This study aims to offer additional evidence on the contribution of business simulation games to students' learning outcomes, considering student interactions in online discussion forums. We conducted a qualitative research with the online discussion forums of 5 different courses at bachelor and master levels, which involves 41 students' teams. The final sample was composed of 3681 messages posted by the students. The results reveal that some generic and specific managerial skills exert a positive influence on learning outcomes. Students mostly highlighted teamwork, decision-making, information processing, reaching agreements, and dealing with uncertainty as the most relevant contributions of the game towards their learning. These results have instructional and pedagogical implications for determining the best way to enhance students' motivation and learning outcomes when using digital technology methods, which involves recommendations that affect their design and monitoring

E-Learning in Postsecondary Education

Over the past decade postsecondary education has been moving increasingly from the class room to online. During the fall 2010 term 31 percent of U.S. college students took at least one online course. The primary reasons for the growth of e-learning in the nation\u27s colleges and universities include the desire of those institutions to generate new revenue streams, improve access, and offer students greater scheduling flexibility. Yet the growth of e-learning has been accompanied by a continuing debate about its effectiveness and by the recognition that a number of barriers impede its widespread adoption in higher education

The seamless integration of Web3D technologies with university curricula to engage the changing student cohort

The increasing tendency of many university students to study at least some courses at a distance limits their opportunities for the interactions fundamental to learning. Online learning can assist but relies heavily on text, which is limiting for some students. The popularity of computer games, especially among the younger students, and the emergence of networked games and game-like virtual worlds offers opportunities for enhanced interaction in educational applications. For virtual worlds to be widely adopted in higher education it is desirable to have approaches to design and development that are responsive to needs and limited in their resource requirements. Ideally it should be possible for academics without technical expertise to adapt virtual worlds to support their teaching needs. This project identified Web3D, a technology that is based on the X3D standards and which presents 3D virtual worlds within common web browsers, as an approach worth exploring for educational application. The broad goals of the project were to produce exemplars of Web3D for educational use, together with development tools and associated resources to support non-technical academic adopters, and to promote an Australian community of practice to support broader adoption of Web3D in education. During the first year of the project exemplar applications were developed and tested. The Web3D technology was found to be still in a relatively early stage of development in which the application of standards did not ensure reliable operation in different environments. Moreover, ab initio development of virtual worlds and associated tools proved to be more demanding of resources than anticipated and was judged unlikely in the near future to result in systems that non-technical academics could use with confidence. In the second year the emphasis moved to assisting academics to plan and implement teaching in existing virtual worlds that provided relatively easy to use tools for customizing an environment. A project officer worked with participating academics to support the teaching of significant elements of courses within Second LifeTM. This approach was more successful in producing examples of good practice that could be shared with and emulated by other academics. Trials were also conducted with ExitRealityTM, a new Australian technology that presents virtual worlds in a web browser. Critical factors in the success of the project included providing secure access to networked computers with the necessary capability; negotiating the complexity of working across education, design of virtual worlds, and technical requirements; and supporting participants with professional development in the technology and appropriate pedagogy for the new environments. Major challenges encountered included working with experimental technologies that are evolving rapidly and deploying new networked applications on secure university networks. The project has prepared the way for future expansion in the use of virtual worlds for teaching at USQ and has contributed to the emergence of a national network of tertiary educators interested in the educational applications of virtual worlds

A sweetspot for innovation:developing games with purpose through student-staff collaboration

Within industry as well as academia, developing games that have wider impact on society has been of particular interest in the last decade. The increasing use of terms such as ‘games with purpose’, ‘serious games’ and gamification’ has been mirrored in a flurry of activity in games research. Broader applications of games beyond entertainment are now well-understood and accepted, with universities and companies excelling in creating games to serve particular needs. However, it is not explicitly clear how undergraduates of game design and development courses can be directly involved in serious game creation. With most undergraduates inspired by commercial games development, and the games industry requiring that universities teach specific technical skills in their courses, balancing the research aspirations of academics with the educational requirements of an appropriate undergraduate course can be a difficult balancing act. In this paper, the authors present three case studies of games with purpose developed through collaboration between undergraduate students and academic staff. In all cases, the educational value of the projects for the students is considered in relation to the research value for the academics, who face increasing demands to develop research outcomes despite a necessity to provide a first-rate learning experience and nurture future game developers