Environnement informatique pour la conception, la production et le suivi de Serious Games

National audienceSerious games are pedagogical multimedia products made to help learners develop specific skills. Their use has proven to be promising in many domains, but is at present restricted by the time consuming and costly nature of the developing process. When developing Serious Games (SGs) for academic purposes, not only is there a budgetary challenge, but there is also the challenge of integrating enough educational value without sacrificing the fun characteristics. In this article, we detail the designing process of a SG and enumerate the various tools we can offer to the SG conception teem to help them design better and faster.On assiste à un essor impressionnant des Serious Games (SG) dans beaucoup de domaines. Ces environnements éducatifs sont en effet très prometteurs mais ils posent aussi des problèmes en termes de coût et de temps pour les étapes de conception et de production. Nous proposons un ensemble d'outils informatiques et de démarches principalement organisées autour de composants interopérables et génériques qui visent à surmonter ces barrières

Lessons Learned from the Development of a Mobile Learning Game Authoring Tool

International audienceStudents and schools are increasingly equipped with smartphones and tablets. These mobile devices can enhance teaching in many ways. Mobile Learning Games (MLGs) for example, have shown great potential for increasing student's motivation and improving the quality of situated learning. For the past few years, the research community has been working on authoring tools that allow teachers to create and distribute their own MLGs. The development of these authoring tools is challenging and time consuming and even more so if the objective is for these tools to actually be used in classrooms. The Design-Based Research (DBR) paradigm was precisely developed to address these central issues of Technology Enhanced Learning. It involves co-designing and testing with end-users from the beginning of the project. Although DBR increases the acceptance of new educational tools, it also adds several challenges, including the complexity of involving teachers and students in real-world situations and creating several versions of the tools that will be improved iteratively. In this paper, we aim at providing design principles and practical guidance on the way to develop such authoring tools, based on our experience. We conclude on lessons learned from this project and discuss some systematic issues we faced

Evaluating Learning Games during their Conception

International audienceLearning Games (LGs) are educational environments based on a playful approach to learning. Their use has proven to be promising in many domains, but is at present restricted by the time consuming and costly nature of the developing process. In this paper, we propose a set of quality indicators that can help the conception team to evaluate the quality of their LG during the designing process, and before it is developed. By doing so, the designers can identify and repair problems in the early phases of the conception and therefore reduce the alteration phases, that occur after testing the LG's prototype. These quality indicators have been validated by 6 LG experts that used them to assess the quality of 24 LGs in the process of being designed. They have also proven to be useful as design guidelines for novice LG designers

Towards Industrialized Conception and Production of Serious Games

Serious Games (SGs) have experienced a tremendous outburst these last years. Video game companies have been producing fun, user-friendly SGs, but their educational value has yet to be proven. Meanwhile, cognition research scientist have been developing SGs in such a way as to guarantee an educational gain, but the fun and attractive characteristics featured often would not meet the public's expectations. The ideal SG must combine these two aspects while still being economically viable. In this article, we propose a production chain model to efficiently conceive and produce SGs that are certified for their educational gain and fun qualities. Each step of this chain will be described along with the human actors, the tools and the documents that intervene

Building on the Case Teaching Method to Generate Learning Games Relevant to Numerous Educational Fields

University teachers often feel the need to try innovative learning technologies such as Learning Games to motivate the new generation of students. However, the typically limited resources of universities coupled with the high cost of designing and developing Learning Games result in it rarely being feasible to meet this need. To address this challenging problem, we have designed a framework that allows teachers to create their own Learning Games with very little or no help from developers and graphic designers. This framework, tested and validated by several university teachers, is suited to a wide variety of educational fields because it generates Learning Games based on the widely-used case teaching method.Comment: International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies, ICALT, Beijing : China (2013

TurtleTablet : un jeu collaboratif et tangible sur tablette pour l'initiation à la programmation

National audienceLes jeux numériques sont souvent utilisés au collège pour initier les élèves aux bases de la programmation informatique. Par ailleurs, le travail en groupe tient une place très importante dans l’apprentissage des sciences et ces jeux sur ordinateur sont couramment effectués en groupe de deux élèves. Cependant, les interactions clavier-souris ou tactile, et la conception même de ces jeux freinent la collaboration. Le plus souvent, seul un élève est en-gagé dans l’activité à un moment donné. Pour favoriser une réelle pédagogie s’appuyant sur la collaboration, nous proposons TurtleTablet, un jeu sur tablette pour aider les élèves à comprendre comment se déroule l’exécution d’un algorithme. Les activités de ce jeu sont conçues pour un binôme d’élèves, de façon à ce que chacun ait un rôle actif. De plus, les élèves doivent manipuler des objets tangibles pour interagir avec la tablette. Ce mode d’interaction, déjà éprouvé sur tables interactives, est inédit sur tablette

Technologies sémantiques pour l’apprentissage de la botanique en mobilité

National audienceLe projet ANR ReVeRIES (Reconnaissance de Végétaux Récréative, Interactive et Educative sur Smartphone), lancé en février 2016, vise à faciliter sur l’aide numérique à l’apprentissage de la botanique en situation réelle, c’est à dire dans la nature, ou les utilisateurs ne peuvent utiliser qu’un smartphone. Les solutions existantes pour l’assistance à l’identification sont fondées sur la construction manuelle de clés d’identifications. La spécificité de notre solution est l’utilisation de technologies sémantiques pour assister la création et la mise à jour automatique d’une clé d’identification

Comment évaluer la qualité d'un Learning Game pendant sa conception ?

National audienceLes Learning Games (LG) sont des environnements éducatifs fondés sur une approche ludique de l'apprentissage. Pertinents dans de nombreux domaines, ils posent pourtant des problèmes liés à leur création complexe et coûteuse en moyens et en temps. Dans cet article, nous proposons une grille d'indicateurs de qualité qui peut être utilisée par les concepteurs pour évaluer leur LG en cours de conception, avant même le dévelop-pement de celui-ci. Ils peuvent ainsi remédier au plus vite aux problèmes repérés et donc réduire le temps des phases de modifications après test des prototypes. Ces indicateurs ont été validés par 6 experts en LG qui les ont utilisés pour évaluer la qualité de 24 LG en cours de conception et décrits sous la forme de spécifications textuelles