Raising awareness on Archaeology: A Multiplayer Game-Based Approach with Mixed Reality

International audienceOur research deals with the development of a new type of game‐based learning environment: (M)MORPG based on mixed reality, applied in the archaeological domain. In this paper, we propose a learning scenario that enhances players' motivation thanks to individual, collaborative and social activities and that offers a continuous experience between the virtual environment and real places (archaeological sites, museum). After describing the challenge to a rich multidisciplinary approach involving both computer scientists and archaeologists, we present two types of game: multiplayer online role‐playing games and mixed reality games. We build on the specificities of these games to make the design choices described in the paper. The proposed approach aims at raising awareness among people on the scientific approach in Archaeology, by providing them information in the virtual environment and encouraging them to go on real sites. We finally discuss the issues raised by this work, such as the tensions between the perceived individual, team and community utilities, as well as the choice of the entering point in the learning scenario (real or virtual) for the players' involvement in the game

Social Facilitation Due to Online Inter-classrooms Tournaments

In this paper we explore the impact of an inter-classrooms math tournament implemented through internet. The strategy is to increase learning through intra-classroom collaboration generated by inter-classroom competition. Ten fourth grade classes with all their students from eight schools participated. During previous weeks students practiced on-line and played a cloud based board game designed to learn word problems. Afterwards, all students participated on an inter-classroom tournament. They played on-line synchronously during 60 min. The game was played in dyads formed from different schools. The list of each classroom average score was published every 5 min on each student computer. We found an important social facilitation effect: a significant improvement on the performance of male students weak on math, and therefore a reduction on the performance gap between mathematically weak and strong male students. The improvement of female students weak on math was also significant but lower

Teaching Energy Efficiency: A Cross-Border Public Class and Lesson Study in STEM

As part of an APEC educational project on the cross-cutting concept of energy, researchers and teachers from 6 countries spent 8 months designing, testing and implementing a pilot STEM public class with two schools from Chile and one from the US. One of the researchers taught a lesson from a school in Chile, with a live transmission to the other two schools via Skype. At the same time, the lesson was also broadcasted via video streaming. In addition to live questions and answers, students used individual devices to answer four open-ended questions that were commented on by the researcher as he received them. The experience demonstrated that Cross-Border Public Classes boost student engagement and represent a promising strategy for introducing a key 21st century skill: synchronous learning involving multiple teams across the world. It also revealed how Lesson Study and Public Classes integrated with ICT network technology can form a powerful learning ecosystem for regional development and social innovation