How Does Competition Help Future Learning in Serious Games? An Exploratory Study in Learning Search Engine Optimization

Serious games, many of which are multi-player games, have been commonly used in information technology education and training. Competition can be intuitively associated with games; however, it is not always considered as a necessary attribute of serious games. Particularly, the learning impact results of competition are mixed. Challenge and control are two game attributes that are highly relevant to competition. With the use of a multi-player serious game, SEO War, this study aims to explore the relationships among competition, perceived control, perceived challenge, and self-efficacy in a game-based learning environment. Particularly, it investigates whether competition leads to self-efficacy. It also examines whether perceived challenge and perceived control mediate the relationship between competition and self-efficacy in serious games. This study contributes to the expanding literature on selecting important attributes for serious games, and it advances our understanding of the mechanism of how competition leads to self-efficacy. Moreover, it will help game designers decide on important game attributes through which games can be enhanced

Teaching Paleoradiography Theory Using E-learning – A Participatory Action Research Study with Undergraduate Archaeology Students

This article presents the development of an e-learning paleoradiography short course for undergraduate archaeology students using participatory action research. The use of x-rays in archaeology is well known and yet studies exploring the pedagogic preferences of students are lacking, particularly for online learning. To address this shortfall 100 students in groups of 50 were invited to participate and provide feedback on an e-learning course which ran in April-May and July-August 2021. Participants required internet access, a university email address, and four hours to complete the course. Initial feedback was used to improve the course for a second iteration. The course attracted international interest with students from 22 unique universities in nine countries. The majority were females in their mid-twenties with a slight dominance of second year students. A total of 52 participants (52%) completed the course to receive a certificate. Free-text responses provided rich and valuable feedback for course improvement far superior to blunt Likert scales of evaluation. Results highlighted critical issues including webpage navigation, device compatibility, and alternative formats for learning content. While the integration of a discussion forum failed to encourage inter-participant engagement, universal requests for the judicious use of images and videos were apparent for online learning

Teaching paleoradiography theory using e-learning – a participatory action research study with undergraduate archaeology students

This article presents the development of an e-learning paleoradiography short course for undergraduate archaeology students using participatory action research. The use of x-rays in archaeology is well known and yet studies exploring the pedagogic preferences of students are lacking, particularly for online learning. To address this shortfall 100 students in groups of 50 were invited to participate and provide feedback on an e-learning course which ran in April-May and July-August 2021. Participants required internet access, a university email address, and four hours to complete the course. Initial feedback was used to improve the course for a second iteration. The course attracted international interest with students from 22 unique universities in nine countries. The majority were females in their mid-twenties with a slight dominance of second year students. A total of 52 participants (52%) completed the course to receive a certificate. Free-text responses provided rich and valuable feedback for course improvement far superior to blunt Likert scales of evaluation. Results highlighted critical issues including webpage navigation, device compatibility, and alternative formats for learning content. While the integration of a discussion forum failed to encourage inter-participant engagement, universal requests for the judicious use of images and videos were apparent for online learning

Analysis of applications to improve the energy savings in residential buildings based on Systemic Quality Model

Creating a definition of the features and the architecture of a new Energy Management Software (EMS) is complex because different professionals will be involved in creating that definition and in using the tool. To simplify this definition and aid in the eventual selection of an existing EMS to fit a specific need, a set of metrics that considers the primary issues and drawbacks of the EMS is decisive. This study proposes a set of metrics to evaluate and compare EMS applications. Using these metrics will allow professionals to highlight the tendencies and detect the drawbacks of current EMS applications and to eventually develop new EMS applications based on the results of the analysis. This study presents a list of the applications to be examined and describes the primary issues to be considered in the development of a new application. This study follows the Systemic Quality Model (SQMO), which has been used as a starting point to develop new EMS, but can also be used to select an existing EMS that fits the goals of a company. Using this type of analysis, we were able to detect the primary features desired in an EMS software. These features are numerically scaled, allowing professionals to select the most appropriate EMS that fits for their purposes. This allows the development of EMS utilizing an iterative and user-centric approach. We can apply this methodology to guide the development of future EMS and to define the priorities that are desired in this type of software.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Gamification Analytics: Support for Monitoring and Adapting Gamification Designs

Inspired by the engaging effects in video games, gamification aims at motivating people to show desired behaviors in a variety of contexts. During the last years, gamification influenced the design of many software applications in the consumer as well as enterprise domain. In some cases, even whole businesses, such as Foursquare, owe their success to well-designed gamification mechanisms in their product. Gamification also attracted the interest of academics from fields, such as human-computer interaction, marketing, psychology, and software engineering. Scientific contributions comprise psychological theories and models to better understand the mechanisms behind successful gamification, case studies that measure the psychological and behavioral outcomes of gamification, methodologies for gamification projects, and technical concepts for platforms that support implementing gamification in an efficient manner. Given a new project, gamification experts can leverage the existing body of knowledge to reuse previous, or derive new gamification ideas. However, there is no one size fits all approach for creating engaging gamification designs. Gamification success always depends on a wide variety of factors defined by the characteristics of the audience, the gamified application, and the chosen gamification design. In contrast to researchers, gamification experts in the industry rarely have the necessary skills and resources to assess the success of their gamification design systematically. Therefore, it is essential to provide them with suitable support mechanisms, which help to assess and improve gamification designs continuously. Providing suitable and efficient gamification analytics support is the ultimate goal of this thesis. This work presents a study with gamification experts that identifies relevant requirements in the context of gamification analytics. Given the identified requirements and earlier work in the analytics domain, this thesis then derives a set of gamification analytics-related activities and uses them to extend an existing process model for gamification projects. The resulting model can be used by experts to plan and execute their gamification projects with analytics in mind. Next, this work identifies existing tools and assesses them with regards to their applicability in gamification projects. The results can help experts to make objective technology decisions. However, they also show that most tools have significant gaps towards the identified user requirements. Consequently, a technical concept for a suitable realization of gamification analytics is derived. It describes a loosely coupled analytics service that helps gamification experts to seamlessly collect and analyze gamification-related data while minimizing dependencies to IT experts. The concept is evaluated successfully via the implementation of a prototype and application in two real-world gamification projects. The results show that the presented gamification analytics concept is technically feasible, applicable to actual projects, and also valuable for the systematic monitoring of gamification success