Last Island: Exploring Transitions to Sustainable Futures through Play

© 2019 Association for Computing Machinery. A serious game was designed and developed with the goal of exploring potential sustainable futures and the transitions towards them. This computer-assisted board game, Last Island, which incorporates a system dynamics model into a board game's core mechanics, attempts to impart knowledge and understanding on sustainability and how an isolated society may transition to various futures to a non-expert community of players. To this end, this collaborativecompetitive game utilizes the Miniworld model which simulates three variables important for the sustainability of a society: Human population, economic production and the state of the environment. The resulting player interaction offers possibilities to collectively discover and validate potential scenarios for transitioning to a sustainable future, encouraging players to work together to balance the model output while also competing on individual objectives to be the individual winner of the game

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

Learning sustainability by making games. The experience of a challenge as a novel approach for Education for Sustainable Development

[EN] Nowadays, the programs of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) are designed for changing attitudes on environmental, economic, and social dimensions. In this context, and considering the varied ages of the participating students, it is necessary to implement appropriate pedagogical methods that are generally different from the traditional ones. Among the available approaches, Sustainability serious games (SSGs) appear to be an ideal candidate to facilitate ESD providing students with opportunities to experience the complex issues of sustainability. Besides learning by playing SSG, another relevant opportunity, capable of engaging teachers and students into a relevant and meaningful learning context, is learning by making SSGs, capable of engaging teachers and students into a relevant and meaningful learning context. In light of these comments, this paper proposes a major contribution to the research on learning by making games through a detailed discussion of the results obtained during a University Challenge experience, where students were involved in the design and development of SSGs. The Challenge involved 59 higher education (HE) students who were asked to work in groups to create a (per-group) prototype of a SSG aimed at improving the sustainability of our campus. Results of the Challenge assessment show that this learning approach can indeed be considered a valuable alternative for ESD.Cravero, S.; Strada, F.; Lami, I.; Bottino, A. (2021). Learning sustainability by making games. The experience of a challenge as a novel approach for Education for Sustainable Development. En 7th International Conference on Higher Education Advances (HEAd'21). Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. 651-659. https://doi.org/10.4995/HEAd21.2021.13192OCS65165

Setting the stage – embodied and spatial dimensions in emerging programming practices.

In the design of interactive systems, developers sometimes need to engage in various ways of physical performance in order to communicate ideas and to test out properties of the system to be realised. External resources such as sketches, as well as bodily action, often play important parts in such processes, and several methods and tools that explicitly address such aspects of interaction design have recently been developed. This combined with the growing range of pervasive, ubiquitous, and tangible technologies add up to a complex web of physicality within the practice of designing interactive systems. We illustrate this dimension of systems development through three cases which in different ways address the design of systems where embodied performance is important. The first case shows how building a physical sport simulator emphasises a shift in activity between programming and debugging. The second case shows a build-once run-once scenario, where the fine-tuning and control of the run-time activity gets turned into an act of in situ performance by the programmers. The third example illustrates the explorative and experiential nature of programming and debugging systems for specialised and autonomous interaction devices. This multitude in approaches in existing programming settings reveals an expanded perspective of what practices of interaction design consist of, emphasising the interlinking between design, programming, and performance with the system that is being developed

Key determinants of successful crowdfunding campaigns in the gaming industry

Objectives The main objective of this study was to discover and identify the key determinants contributing to a gaming crowdfunding campaign’s success. Summary 20 gaming campaigns were chosen on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter and observed to their completion. The results of these campaigns were then compared to one another in order to find out what differentiates a successful campaign from an unsuccessful one and the key determinants for success. Conclusions Firstly, upon setting the rewards it is important to think how low you will set your lowest tier. The presentation of the campaign needs to be made in a comprehensive manner. The campaign does not need to run for the full 60 days, as allowed on Kickstarter

Collaborative trails in e-learning environments

This deliverable focuses on collaboration within groups of learners, and hence collaborative trails. We begin by reviewing the theoretical background to collaborative learning and looking at the kinds of support that computers can give to groups of learners working collaboratively, and then look more deeply at some of the issues in designing environments to support collaborative learning trails and at tools and techniques, including collaborative filtering, that can be used for analysing collaborative trails. We then review the state-of-the-art in supporting collaborative learning in three different areas – experimental academic systems, systems using mobile technology (which are also generally academic), and commercially available systems. The final part of the deliverable presents three scenarios that show where technology that supports groups working collaboratively and producing collaborative trails may be heading in the near future