A Meta-model for Developing Simulation Games in Higher Education and Professional Development Training

Games and simulations can be powerful educational tools for higher education and professional development training. At the same time, the labor and technical costs of development is sufficiently high that simulation games tend to be rather static and course or program specific. The main contribution of this paper is an effort to define a new meta-model for educational simulation games that is transferable to a broad range of disciplines and technical training fields. A meta-model provides a formal structure upon which similar categories of game play components are tied to specific learning objectives and easily updatable knowledge content while offering an infinite combination of playing experiences and maintaining consistent pedagogical standards. To illustrate, this paper draws from the application of our meta-model as used in developing a simulation game for software engineering education. Preliminary validation results are presented, in which the meta-model is used as a foundation in the architecture for a game development platform

AN EMERGING THEORY ON THE INTERACTION BETWEEN REQUIREMENTS ENGINEERING AND SYSTEMS ARCHITECTING BASED ON A SUITE OF EXPLORATORY EMPIRICAL STUDIES

Requirements Engineering and Systems Architecting are often considered the most important phases of the software development lifecycle. Because of their close proximity in the software development lifecycle, there is a high degree of interaction between these two processes. While such interaction has been recognized and researched in terms of new technology (particularly methods and tools), there is a distinct lack of empirical understanding regarding the scientific properties of this interaction. Furthermore, in Requirements Engineering and Systems Architecting, not only technical but human aspects are considered critical for the success of these processes due to these processes lying at the front-end of the development cycle and therefore being more aligned with real-world issues. Thus, the scientific properties of the interactions between Requirements Engineering and Systems Architecting can be broken down into these two key aspects. For instance, the following example research questions relate to such scientific properties: What is the impact of an existing system’s architecture on requirements decision-making? What kinds of requirements-oriented problems are encountered during architecting? What is the impact of an existing systems architecture on new requirements being elicited? What is the impact of requirements engineering knowledge on systems architecting? There is little in the literature addressing such questions. This thesis explores such issues through a suite of six exploratory empirical studies that were conducted over the last five years. Based on the observations from these studies, an emerging theory is proposed that describes the impact of human and process factors in the interaction between Requirements Engineering and Systems Architecting. The impact of this emerging body of knowledge is deemed to be on the following: technology development for Requirements Engineering and Software Architecting (methods, tools, processes, etc.); hiring and training personnel for Requirements Engineering and Systems Architecture processes in industry; Requirements Engineering and Systems Architecture project planning; curriculum improvement in academia; and future empirical research in Requirements Engineering and Systems Architecting

Mobile Games for Learning:A Pattern-Based Approach

The core concern of this thesis is the design of mobile games for learning. The conditions and requirements that are vital in order to make mobile games suitable and effective for learning environments are investigated. The base for exploration is the pattern approach as an established form of templates that provide solutions for recurrent problems. Building on this acknowledged form of exchanging and re-using knowledge, patterns for game design are used to classify the many gameplay rules and mechanisms in existence. This research draws upon pattern descriptions to analyze learning game concepts and to abstract possible relationships between gameplay patterns and learning outcomes. The linkages that surface are the starting bases for a series of game design concepts and their implementations are subsequently evaluated with regard to learning outcomes. The findings and resulting knowledge from this research is made accessible by way of implications and recommendations for future design decisions

Designing Playful Systems

Play is a common, yet elusive phenomenon. Many definitions of play and explanations for its existence have been brought forward in various disciplines such as psychology, anthropology, ethology and in the humanities. As an activity apparently serving no other purpose than itself, play can be simply considered a pleasant pastime. Yet its equation with fun has been challenged by artists and scholars alike. Being in a playful state does not warrant extrinsic motivation or being conscious of an external purpose. However, play creates meaning, and scientists are pursuing functional explanations for it. These conflicting observations are contributing to the ambiguity of play and they raise questions about the limits of complexity that present discourses are able to reflect. This thesis presents a comprehensive, transdisciplinary approach to describe and understand play, based on systems-theory, constructivism, cybernetics and practical exploration. Observing play in this way involves theoretical analysis, reflection and critique as well as the practice of design, development and artistic exposition. By constructing, re-contextualising and discussing eight of my own projects, I explore the distinction between theory and practice through which playful systems emerge. Central to my methodology is the concept of distinctions as a fundamental method of observation. It is introduced itself as a distinction and then applied throughout, in order to describe and discuss phenomena of play from a wide range of different perspectives. This includes paradoxical, first-person and conflicting accounts and it enables discourses that cross disciplinary boundaries. In summary, the three interrelated contributions to knowledge in my research project are: I contribute to the emerging field of game studies through a comprehensive systems-theoretical description on play. I also provide a methodology in which theory and practice inform each other through mutual observation, construction, reflection and critical evaluation. Finally, I present eight projects, including a playful system developed in a speculative approach that I call anthroponeutral design. These results represent a novel transdisciplinary perspective on play that offers new opportunities for further research

The Multimodal Tutor: Adaptive Feedback from Multimodal Experiences

This doctoral thesis describes the journey of ideation, prototyping and empirical testing of the Multimodal Tutor, a system designed for providing digital feedback that supports psychomotor skills acquisition using learning and multimodal data capturing. The feedback is given in real-time with machine-driven assessment of the learner's task execution. The predictions are tailored by supervised machine learning models trained with human annotated samples. The main contributions of this thesis are: a literature survey on multimodal data for learning, a conceptual model (the Multimodal Learning Analytics Model), a technological framework (the Multimodal Pipeline), a data annotation tool (the Visual Inspection Tool) and a case study in Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation training (CPR Tutor). The CPR Tutor generates real-time, adaptive feedback using kinematic and myographic data and neural networks