Klemke, R., & Kravčík, M. (2012). Open 3D Environments for Competitive and Collaborative Educational Games. In S. Bocconi, R. Klamma, & Y. Bachvarova (Eds.), Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Pedagogically-driven Serious Games (PDSG 2012). In conjunction with the Seventh European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL 2012) (pp. 15-18). September, 18, 2012, Saarbrücken, Germany. CEUR workshop proceedings, Aachen, http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-898/Educational games have a lot of potential to raise students’ motivation and improve the quality of education when applied properly. But finding a suitable game for a particular learning objective is not easy and development of a new one is expensive. In our university course a group of students developed a prototype of a serious gaming tool for architectural design, which is based on the Google Street View environment. With this tool teams can model 3D buildings, place them in real world images, share their results, and rate them. The solution provides a better contextualization of the model and paves a way towards integration with a full 3D environment, which should even more improve the serious gaming experience in the architectural design.GALA NoE, Surfnet/Kennisnet Innovation Programme 201

Klemke, Roland

Kravcik, Milos

English

Educational games have a lot of potential to raise students’ motivation and improve the quality of education when applied properly. But finding a suitable game for a particular learning objective is not easy and development of a new one is expensive. In our university course a group of students developed a prototype of a serious gaming tool for architectural design, which is based on the Google Street View environment. With this tool teams can model 3D buildings, place them in real world images, share their results, and rate them. The solution provides a better contextualization of the model and paves a way towards integration with a full 3D environment, which should even more improve the serious gaming experience in the architectural design

NARCIS 

Open 3D Environments for Competitive and Collaborative Educational Games

Open University of the Netherlands Research Portal

Open Universiteit www.ou.nl Open 3D Environments for Competitive and CollaborativeEducational GamesCitation for published version (APA):Klemke, R., & Kravcik, M. (2012). Open 3D Environments for Competitive and Collaborative Educational Games.Paper presented at 7th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL) 2012, Saarbrücken,Saarland, Germany.Document status and date:Published: 04/10/2012Document Version:Peer reviewed versionPlease check the document version of this publication:• A submitted manuscript is the version of the article upon submission and before peer-review. There can be important differences betweenthe submitted version and the official published version of record. People interested in the research are advised to contact the author for thefinal version of the publication, or visit the DOI to the publisher's website.• The final author version and the galley proof are versions of the publication after peer review.• The final published version features the final layout of the paper including the volume, issue and page numbers.Link to publicationGeneral rightsCopyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright ownersand it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights.• Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research.• You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain• You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal.If the publication is distributed under the terms of Article 25fa of the Dutch Copyright Act, indicated by the “Taverne” license above, pleasefollow below link for the End User Agreement:https://www.ou.nl/taverne-agreementTake down policyIf you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us at:pure-support@ou.nlproviding details and we will investigate your claim.Downloaded from https://research.ou.nl/ on date: 08 Sep. 2023Open 3D Environments for Competitive and Collaborative Educational Games Roland Klemke1, Milos Kravcik2 1 CELSTEC, Valkenburgerweg 177, Heerlen, The Netherlands roland.klemke@ou.nl 2 Advanced Community Information Systems (ACIS), Informatik 5,  RWTH Aachen University, Germany kravcik@dbis.rwth-aachen.de Abstract. Educational games have a lot of potential to raise students’ motivation and improve the quality of education when applied properly. But finding a suitable game for a particular learning objective is not easy and development of a new one is expensive. In our university course a group of students developed a prototype of a serious gaming tool for architectural design, which is based on the Google Street View environment. With this tool teams can model 3D buildings, place them in real world images, share their results, and rate them. The solution provides a better contextualization of the model and paves a way towards integration with a full 3D environment, which should even more improve the serious gaming experience in the architectural design. Keywords: game based learning, 3D worlds, open platforms, competitive, collaborative 1. Introduction Despite the long tradition of games for education and training, their uptake in higher education is very limited - especially, when compared to the boost in the games market [1][2]. The reasons for this are manifold: high technical demands are in conflict with available budgets [3]. Educational games often do not fit in the educational context or they are hard to tailor [4]. It is hard for teachers to support educational games within their educational processes [5]. In a previous paper, we explored and reported on an approach to address the high technical demands and the limited familiarity of teachers with games based on freely available tools and open platforms [6]. In this paper, we will build on this work and explore an extension of one of the approaches towards 3D-modelling embedded in open environments. By extending its range of openly accessible productivity tools with open APIs (Application Programmer’s Interfaces) that can be used by developers to create services and tools based on Google’s suite of technologies, Google simplifies the process of developing specialised applications and services that rely on well tested user interfaces and back-end technologies. Google Street View is one of these tools, offered by Google as an add-on to the popular Google Maps. Street View offers navigable, 3D-like visualisations of the environment, displayed from a user point-of-view. A user can navigate through Street View as if moving around the actual scenery. Based on Street View as a front-end component, the StreetLearn game engine [6] is designed as a simulated location-based game combining locations, objects, players, and tasks in a 3D-environment representing the real world. Players as well as all objects and tasks are associated with a specific location on the map. The game starts at a specific location, where players are confronted with an initial task description. Typical tasks comprise finding locations, finding/taking objects, retrieving information, and answering questions. Solving a task leads to scores and usually a follow-up task. Players can be organised in competing teams that share tasks. Teams gain a team score, but individual players also score individually. Typical examples for StreetLearn games comprise scavenger hunt games, location-based quiz-rallies, or exploration games. Looking at gaming processes and learning processes from a more pedagogical perspective, StreetLearn is designed with the learning process being controlled by the gaming process [7].  2. Pedagogical and technological approach Using Street View as game platform has a specific drawback in educational situations, where real 3D-models offer an additional benefit, such as architectural education: the Street View-based user interface only shows the 2D surface of the environment. Consequently, it is our aim to combine existing 3D models with the StreetLearn interface to provide an in depth experience. In the course of a student development project at RWTH, a group of computer science students participating in the course Hightech Entrepreneurship and New Media (HENM’11) consequently got the task to enhance the StreetLearn environment with a 3D visualisation add-on that allows visualising 3D models within the StreetLearn environment. This way, the photographic environment of StreetLearn can be extended with explorable 3D models of existing or planned buildings. The add-on allows extending the game play of StreetLearn: while previously, the existing world serves as a playground, where players could navigate and interact, now it is possible to enhance the environment with virtual entities.  This idea has been taken to a competitive architectural game: several student teams compete in an architectural competition game. Each team represents an architectural firm, which tries to win several projects. Each of these projects is represented by a virtual construction site, represented on the map. The game process introduces the game goal and guides the team around these different sites in order to receive information, retrieve hints, and solve architectural tasks by creating 3D models, which they place in the StreetLearn environment. After completion of the tasks, participants  Fig. 1 StreetLearn user interface of competing groups can rate the other group’s outcomes. This way, the game offers two motivating and pedagogically important principles: collaboration (applied within a group of students) and competition (applied across groups). Collaborative learning [9] fosters engagement of students, who can capitalize on one another’s competences. The competitive aspect stimulates the performance of groups. Moreover, the design dimension emphasizes also constructivistic learning principles [10], including active [11], experiential [12], and problem-based learning [13]. This type of learning is an active process of interpreting and constructing individual knowledge representations. It aims at complex problems that do not have a single correct answer and is based on concrete experience. Thus the proposed pedagogical approach cultivates a whole spectrum of cognitive skills from the revised Bloom’s taxonomy [10], including the highest ones – analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. Technically, the students built on the existing StreetLearn object model as described in [6] and extend its MapItem entity, which serves as a general purpose location-based object. As shown in fig. 2, ConstructionItem, representing a construction site on the map, extends MapItem. ConstructionItem can contain a number of BuildingItems, which represent alternative designs created by competing teams. The BuildingStatus allows associating a simple process model to buildings in order to represent several design and construction phases. This approach allows building on the existing gaming infrastructure of StreetLearn (game process, team play, scoring mechanism) while concentrating on the novel aspects (3D model visualisation, architectural process representation).    Fig. 2 StreetLearn with embedded 3D model (left) and Extension of StreetLearn object model (right) 3. Results and conclusion Within the student project, we were able to demonstrate the development of a prototypical StreetLearn add-on, which was capable of visualizing uploaded 3D-models on top of the StreetLearn user interface. Also, the collaboration and competition features have been realised within the StreetLearn architecture. The work presented here is in preliminary status, a full evaluation of the extended StreetLearn module has not yet been performed. First feedback gathered by presenting the prototype to architectural students indicates two main messages: (1) The integration of 3D models in their “natural” environment such as provided by StreetLearn gives a better contextualisation of the model and the surrounding it may be realised in. (2) The user interface integration of StreetLearn and the 3D-models however feels a bit unnatural, due to the non-3D behaviour of the underlying Street View technology. For a future version of this approach, we consequently think of integration with a full 3D environment such as Google Earth.  Acknowledgments. We want to thank the participating Students of the HENM’11 course for their contributions. Part of the work presented here was co-funded by SURFnet/Kennisnet in their programme ‘Innovation of Higher Education 2011’. References 1. PWC (2010) Global Entertainment and Media Outlook: 2010-2014. http://www.pwc.com/  2. National Gaming Survey (2009) Detailed data of gaming in the Netherlands. Newzo, TNS-NIPO. [Online], www.nationaalgamingonderzoek.nl 3. Westera, W., Nadolski, R., Hummel, H. and Wopereis, I. (2008) ‘Serious Games for Higher Education: a Framework for Reducing Design Complexity’, Journal of Computer-Assisted Learning, vol. 24, no. 5, pp. 420-432. 4. Klopfer, E., Osterweil, S. and Salen, K. (2009) Moving Learning Games Forward, Obstacles Opportunities & Openness, Cambridge MA: MIT/The Education Arcade,Available: http://education.mit.edu/papers/MovingLearningGamesForward_EdArcade.pdf [2 April 2011] 5. Van Rosmalen, P., Sloep, P., Kester, L., Brouns, F., de Croock, M., and Pannekeet, K. (2008) ‘A learner support model based on peer tutor selection’, Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, vol. 24, pp. 74-86. 6. Van Rosmalen, P., Klemke, R., & Westera, W. (2011) Alleviating the Entrance to Serious Games by Exploring the Use of Commonly Available Tools. In Proceedings of the 5th European Conference on Games Based Learning, 20-21 October, Athens, pp. 613-619. 7. Kelle, S., Klemke, R., Gruber, M. and Specht, M. (2011) ‘Standardization of Game Based Learning Design’, Proceedings of the International Conference on Computational Science and Applications. Heidelberg, Berlin, New York: Springer. June 20-23, 2011, Santander, Spain. 8. Dillenbourg, P. (1999). Collaborative Learning: Cognitive and Computational Approaches. Advances in Learning and Instruction Series. New York, NY: Elsevier Science, Inc. 9. Anderson, L. & Krathwohl, D. A. (2001) Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives New York: Longman. 10. Jonassen, D. (1991). Objectivism vs. constructivism. Educational Technology. Research and Development, 39(3), 5–14. 11. Bonwell, C.; Eison, J. (1991). Active Learning: Creating Excitement in the Classroom. AEHE-ERIC Higher Education Report No. 1. Washington, D.C.: Jossey-Bass. 12. Kolb, D. A. (1984). Experiential learning: Experience as the source of learning and development. Journal of Organizational Behavior (Vol. 8). Prentice-Hall. 13. Hmelo-Silver, C.E. (2004). Problem-based learning: What and How Do Students Learn?. Educational Psychology Review, 16(3), 235-266. Springer Netherlands.  

Open Universiteit www.ou.nl Open 3D Environments for Competitive and CollaborativeEducational GamesCitation for published version (APA):Klemke, R., & Kravcik, M. (2012). Open 3D Environments for Competitive and Collaborative Educational Games.Paper presented at 7th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL) 2012, Saarbrücken,Saarland, Germany.Document status and date:Published: 04/10/2012Document Version:Peer reviewed versionPlease check the document version of this publication:• A submitted manuscript is the version of the article upon submission and before peer-review. There can be important differences betweenthe submitted version and the official published version of record. People interested in the research are advised to contact the author for thefinal version of the publication, or visit the DOI to the publisher's website.• The final author version and the galley proof are versions of the publication after peer review.• The final published version features the final layout of the paper including the volume, issue and page numbers.Link to publicationGeneral rightsCopyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright ownersand it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights.• Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research.• You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain• You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal.If the publication is distributed under the terms of Article 25fa of the Dutch Copyright Act, indicated by the “Taverne” license above, pleasefollow below link for the End User Agreement:https://www.ou.nl/taverne-agreementTake down policyIf you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us at:pure-support@ou.nlproviding details and we will investigate your claim.Downloaded from https://research.ou.nl/ on date: 15 Feb. 2023Open 3D Environments for Competitive and Collaborative Educational Games Roland Klemke1, Milos Kravcik2 1 CELSTEC, Valkenburgerweg 177, Heerlen, The Netherlands roland.klemke@ou.nl 2 Advanced Community Information Systems (ACIS), Informatik 5,  RWTH Aachen University, Germany kravcik@dbis.rwth-aachen.de Abstract. Educational games have a lot of potential to raise students’ motivation and improve the quality of education when applied properly. But finding a suitable game for a particular learning objective is not easy and development of a new one is expensive. In our university course a group of students developed a prototype of a serious gaming tool for architectural design, which is based on the Google Street View environment. With this tool teams can model 3D buildings, place them in real world images, share their results, and rate them. The solution provides a better contextualization of the model and paves a way towards integration with a full 3D environment, which should even more improve the serious gaming experience in the architectural design. Keywords: game based learning, 3D worlds, open platforms, competitive, collaborative 1. Introduction Despite the long tradition of games for education and training, their uptake in higher education is very limited - especially, when compared to the boost in the games market [1][2]. The reasons for this are manifold: high technical demands are in conflict with available budgets [3]. Educational games often do not fit in the educational context or they are hard to tailor [4]. It is hard for teachers to support educational games within their educational processes [5]. In a previous paper, we explored and reported on an approach to address the high technical demands and the limited familiarity of teachers with games based on freely available tools and open platforms [6]. In this paper, we will build on this work and explore an extension of one of the approaches towards 3D-modelling embedded in open environments. By extending its range of openly accessible productivity tools with open APIs (Application Programmer’s Interfaces) that can be used by developers to create services and tools based on Google’s suite of technologies, Google simplifies the process of developing specialised applications and services that rely on well tested user interfaces and back-end technologies. Google Street View is one of these tools, offered by Google as an add-on to the popular Google Maps. Street View offers navigable, 3D-like visualisations of the environment, displayed from a user point-of-view. A user can navigate through Street View as if moving around the actual scenery. Based on Street View as a front-end component, the StreetLearn game engine [6] is designed as a simulated location-based game combining locations, objects, players, and tasks in a 3D-environment representing the real world. Players as well as all objects and tasks are associated with a specific location on the map. The game starts at a specific location, where players are confronted with an initial task description. Typical tasks comprise finding locations, finding/taking objects, retrieving information, and answering questions. Solving a task leads to scores and usually a follow-up task. Players can be organised in competing teams that share tasks. Teams gain a team score, but individual players also score individually. Typical examples for StreetLearn games comprise scavenger hunt games, location-based quiz-rallies, or exploration games. Looking at gaming processes and learning processes from a more pedagogical perspective, StreetLearn is designed with the learning process being controlled by the gaming process [7].  2. Pedagogical and technological approach Using Street View as game platform has a specific drawback in educational situations, where real 3D-models offer an additional benefit, such as architectural education: the Street View-based user interface only shows the 2D surface of the environment. Consequently, it is our aim to combine existing 3D models with the StreetLearn interface to provide an in depth experience. In the course of a student development project at RWTH, a group of computer science students participating in the course Hightech Entrepreneurship and New Media (HENM’11) consequently got the task to enhance the StreetLearn environment with a 3D visualisation add-on that allows visualising 3D models within the StreetLearn environment. This way, the photographic environment of StreetLearn can be extended with explorable 3D models of existing or planned buildings. The add-on allows extending the game play of StreetLearn: while previously, the existing world serves as a playground, where players could navigate and interact, now it is possible to enhance the environment with virtual entities.  This idea has been taken to a competitive architectural game: several student teams compete in an architectural competition game. Each team represents an architectural firm, which tries to win several projects. Each of these projects is represented by a virtual construction site, represented on the map. The game process introduces the game goal and guides the team around these different sites in order to receive information, retrieve hints, and solve architectural tasks by creating 3D models, which they place in the StreetLearn environment. After completion of the tasks, participants  Fig. 1 StreetLearn user interface of competing groups can rate the other group’s outcomes. This way, the game offers two motivating and pedagogically important principles: collaboration (applied within a group of students) and competition (applied across groups). Collaborative learning [9] fosters engagement of students, who can capitalize on one another’s competences. The competitive aspect stimulates the performance of groups. Moreover, the design dimension emphasizes also constructivistic learning principles [10], including active [11], experiential [12], and problem-based learning [13]. This type of learning is an active process of interpreting and constructing individual knowledge representations. It aims at complex problems that do not have a single correct answer and is based on concrete experience. Thus the proposed pedagogical approach cultivates a whole spectrum of cognitive skills from the revised Bloom’s taxonomy [10], including the highest ones – analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. Technically, the students built on the existing StreetLearn object model as described in [6] and extend its MapItem entity, which serves as a general purpose location-based object. As shown in fig. 2, ConstructionItem, representing a construction site on the map, extends MapItem. ConstructionItem can contain a number of BuildingItems, which represent alternative designs created by competing teams. The BuildingStatus allows associating a simple process model to buildings in order to represent several design and construction phases. This approach allows building on the existing gaming infrastructure of StreetLearn (game process, team play, scoring mechanism) while concentrating on the novel aspects (3D model visualisation, architectural process representation).    Fig. 2 StreetLearn with embedded 3D model (left) and Extension of StreetLearn object model (right) 3. Results and conclusion Within the student project, we were able to demonstrate the development of a prototypical StreetLearn add-on, which was capable of visualizing uploaded 3D-models on top of the StreetLearn user interface. Also, the collaboration and competition features have been realised within the StreetLearn architecture. The work presented here is in preliminary status, a full evaluation of the extended StreetLearn module has not yet been performed. First feedback gathered by presenting the prototype to architectural students indicates two main messages: (1) The integration of 3D models in their “natural” environment such as provided by StreetLearn gives a better contextualisation of the model and the surrounding it may be realised in. (2) The user interface integration of StreetLearn and the 3D-models however feels a bit unnatural, due to the non-3D behaviour of the underlying Street View technology. For a future version of this approach, we consequently think of integration with a full 3D environment such as Google Earth.  Acknowledgments. We want to thank the participating Students of the HENM’11 course for their contributions. Part of the work presented here was co-funded by SURFnet/Kennisnet in their programme ‘Innovation of Higher Education 2011’. References 1. PWC (2010) Global Entertainment and Media Outlook: 2010-2014. http://www.pwc.com/  2. National Gaming Survey (2009) Detailed data of gaming in the Netherlands. Newzo, TNS-NIPO. [Online], www.nationaalgamingonderzoek.nl 3. Westera, W., Nadolski, R., Hummel, H. and Wopereis, I. (2008) ‘Serious Games for Higher Education: a Framework for Reducing Design Complexity’, Journal of Computer-Assisted Learning, vol. 24, no. 5, pp. 420-432. 4. Klopfer, E., Osterweil, S. and Salen, K. (2009) Moving Learning Games Forward, Obstacles Opportunities & Openness, Cambridge MA: MIT/The Education Arcade,Available: http://education.mit.edu/papers/MovingLearningGamesForward_EdArcade.pdf [2 April 2011] 5. Van Rosmalen, P., Sloep, P., Kester, L., Brouns, F., de Croock, M., and Pannekeet, K. (2008) ‘A learner support model based on peer tutor selection’, Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, vol. 24, pp. 74-86. 6. Van Rosmalen, P., Klemke, R., & Westera, W. (2011) Alleviating the Entrance to Serious Games by Exploring the Use of Commonly Available Tools. In Proceedings of the 5th European Conference on Games Based Learning, 20-21 October, Athens, pp. 613-619. 7. Kelle, S., Klemke, R., Gruber, M. and Specht, M. (2011) ‘Standardization of Game Based Learning Design’, Proceedings of the International Conference on Computational Science and Applications. Heidelberg, Berlin, New York: Springer. June 20-23, 2011, Santander, Spain. 8. Dillenbourg, P. (1999). Collaborative Learning: Cognitive and Computational Approaches. Advances in Learning and Instruction Series. New York, NY: Elsevier Science, Inc. 9. Anderson, L. & Krathwohl, D. A. (2001) Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives New York: Longman. 10. Jonassen, D. (1991). Objectivism vs. constructivism. Educational Technology. Research and Development, 39(3), 5–14. 11. Bonwell, C.; Eison, J. (1991). Active Learning: Creating Excitement in the Classroom. AEHE-ERIC Higher Education Report No. 1. Washington, D.C.: Jossey-Bass. 12. Kolb, D. A. (1984). Experiential learning: Experience as the source of learning and development. Journal of Organizational Behavior (Vol. 8). Prentice-Hall. 13. Hmelo-Silver, C.E. (2004). Problem-based learning: What and How Do Students Learn?. Educational Psychology Review, 16(3), 235-266. Springer Netherlands.  

DSpace at Open Universiteit Nederland

Open 3D Environments for Competitive and 
Collaborative Educational Games 
Roland Klemke1, Milos Kravcik2 
1 CELSTEC, Valkenburgerweg 177, Heerlen, The Netherlands 
roland.klemke@ou.nl 
2 Advanced Community Information Systems (ACIS), Informatik 5,  
RWTH Aachen University, Germany 
kravcik@dbis.rwth-aachen.de 
Abstract. Educational games have a lot of potential to raise students’ 
motivation and improve the quality of education when applied properly. But 
finding a suitable game for a particular learning objective is not easy and 
development of a new one is expensive. In our university course a group of 
students developed a prototype of a serious gaming tool for architectural design, 
which is based on the Google Street View environment. With this tool teams 
can model 3D buildings, place them in real world images, share their results, 
and rate them. The solution provides a better contextualization of the model and 
paves a way towards integration with a full 3D environment, which should even 
more improve the serious gaming experience in the architectural design. 
Keywords: game based learning, 3D worlds, open platforms, competitive, 
collaborative 
1. Introduction 
Despite the long tradition of games for education and training, their uptake in 
higher education is very limited - especially, when compared to the boost in the 
games market [1][2]. The reasons for this are manifold: high technical demands are in 
conflict with available budgets [3]. Educational games often do not fit in the 
educational context or they are hard to tailor [4]. It is hard for teachers to support 
educational games within their educational processes [5]. In a previous paper, we 
explored and reported on an approach to address the high technical demands and the 
limited familiarity of teachers with games based on freely available tools and open 
platforms [6]. In this paper, we will build on this work and explore an extension of 
one of the approaches towards 3D-modelling embedded in open environments. 
By extending its range of openly accessible productivity tools with open APIs 
(Application Programmer’s Interfaces) that can be used by developers to create 
services and tools based on Google’s suite of technologies, Google simplifies the 
process of developing specialised applications and services that rely on well tested 
user interfaces and back-end technologies. Google Street View is one of these tools, 
offered by Google as an add-on to the popular Google Maps. Street View offers 
navigable, 3D-like visualisations of the environment, displayed from a user point-of-
view. A user can navigate through Street View as if moving around the actual 
scenery. 
Based on Street View as a front-end component, the StreetLearn game engine [6] 
is designed as a simulated location-based game combining locations, objects, players, 
and tasks in a 3D-environment 
representing the real world. Players as 
well as all objects and tasks are associated 
with a specific location on the map. The 
game starts at a specific location, where 
players are confronted with an initial task 
description. Typical tasks comprise 
finding locations, finding/taking objects, 
retrieving information, and answering 
questions. Solving a task leads to scores 
and usually a follow-up task. Players can 
be organised in competing teams that 
share tasks. Teams gain a team score, but 
individual players also score individually. Typical examples for StreetLearn games 
comprise scavenger hunt games, location-based quiz-rallies, or exploration games. 
Looking at gaming processes and learning processes from a more pedagogical 
perspective, StreetLearn is designed with the learning process being controlled by the 
gaming process [7].  
2. Pedagogical and technological approach 
Using Street View as game platform has a specific drawback in educational 
situations, where real 3D-models offer an additional benefit, such as architectural 
education: the Street View-based user interface only shows the 2D surface of the 
environment. Consequently, it is our aim to combine existing 3D models with the 
StreetLearn interface to provide an in depth experience. 
In the course of a student development project at RWTH, a group of computer 
science students participating in the course Hightech Entrepreneurship and New 
Media (HENM’11) consequently got the task to enhance the StreetLearn environment 
with a 3D visualisation add-on that allows visualising 3D models within the 
StreetLearn environment. This way, the photographic environment of StreetLearn can 
be extended with explorable 3D models of existing or planned buildings. The add-on 
allows extending the game play of StreetLearn: while previously, the existing world 
serves as a playground, where players could navigate and interact, now it is possible 
to enhance the environment with virtual entities.  
This idea has been taken to a competitive architectural game: several student teams 
compete in an architectural competition game. Each team represents an architectural 
firm, which tries to win several projects. Each of these projects is represented by a 
virtual construction site, represented on the map. The game process introduces the 
game goal and guides the team around these different sites in order to receive 
information, retrieve hints, and solve architectural tasks by creating 3D models, which 
they place in the StreetLearn environment. After completion of the tasks, participants 
 
Fig. 1 StreetLearn user interface 
of competing groups can rate the other group’s outcomes. This way, the game offers 
two motivating and pedagogically important principles: collaboration (applied within 
a group of students) and competition (applied across groups). Collaborative learning 
[9] fosters engagement of students, who can capitalize on one another’s competences. 
The competitive aspect stimulates the performance of groups. Moreover, the design 
dimension emphasizes also constructivistic learning principles [10], including active 
[11], experiential [12], and problem-based learning [13]. This type of learning is an 
active process of interpreting and constructing individual knowledge representations. 
It aims at complex problems that do not have a single correct answer and is based on 
concrete experience. Thus the proposed pedagogical approach cultivates a whole 
spectrum of cognitive skills from the revised Bloom’s taxonomy [10], including the 
highest ones – analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. 
Technically, the students built on the existing StreetLearn object model as 
described in [6] and extend its MapItem entity, which serves as a general purpose 
location-based object. As shown in fig. 2, ConstructionItem, representing a 
construction site on the map, extends MapItem. ConstructionItem can contain a 
number of BuildingItems, which represent alternative designs created by competing 
teams. The BuildingStatus allows associating a simple process model to buildings in 
order to represent several design and construction phases. 
This approach allows building on the existing gaming infrastructure of StreetLearn 
(game process, team play, scoring mechanism) while concentrating on the novel 
aspects (3D model visualisation, architectural process representation). 
 
  
Fig. 2 StreetLearn with embedded 3D model (left) and Extension of StreetLearn 
object model (right) 
3. Results and conclusion 
Within the student project, we were able to demonstrate the development of a 
prototypical StreetLearn add-on, which was capable of visualizing uploaded 3D-
models on top of the StreetLearn user interface. Also, the collaboration and 
competition features have been realised within the StreetLearn architecture. 
The work presented here is in preliminary status, a full evaluation of the extended 
StreetLearn module has not yet been performed. First feedback gathered by 
presenting the prototype to architectural students indicates two main messages: (1) 
The integration of 3D models in their “natural” environment such as provided by 
StreetLearn gives a better contextualisation of the model and the surrounding it may 
be realised in. (2) The user interface integration of StreetLearn and the 3D-models 
however feels a bit unnatural, due to the non-3D behaviour of the underlying Street 
View technology. For a future version of this approach, we consequently think of 
integration with a full 3D environment such as Google Earth. 
 
Acknowledgments. We want to thank the participating Students of the HENM’11 
course for their contributions. Part of the work presented here was co-funded by 
SURFnet/Kennisnet in their programme ‘Innovation of Higher Education 2011’. 
References 
1. PWC (2010) Global Entertainment and Media Outlook: 2010-2014. http://www.pwc.com/  
2. National Gaming Survey (2009) Detailed data of gaming in the Netherlands. Newzo, TNS-
NIPO. [Online], www.nationaalgamingonderzoek.nl 
3. Westera, W., Nadolski, R., Hummel, H. and Wopereis, I. (2008) ‘Serious Games for Higher 
Education: a Framework for Reducing Design Complexity’, Journal of Computer-Assisted 
Learning, vol. 24, no. 5, pp. 420-432. 
4. Klopfer, E., Osterweil, S. and Salen, K. (2009) Moving Learning Games Forward, 
Obstacles Opportunities & Openness, Cambridge MA: MIT/The Education 
Arcade,Available: 
http://education.mit.edu/papers/MovingLearningGamesForward_EdArcade.pdf [2 April 
2011] 
5. Van Rosmalen, P., Sloep, P., Kester, L., Brouns, F., de Croock, M., and Pannekeet, K. 
(2008) ‘A learner support model based on peer tutor selection’, Journal of Computer 
Assisted Learning, vol. 24, pp. 74-86. 
6. Van Rosmalen, P., Klemke, R., & Westera, W. (2011) Alleviating the Entrance to Serious 
Games by Exploring the Use of Commonly Available Tools. In Proceedings of the 5th 
European Conference on Games Based Learning, 20-21 October, Athens, pp. 613-619. 
7. Kelle, S., Klemke, R., Gruber, M. and Specht, M. (2011) ‘Standardization of Game Based 
Learning Design’, Proceedings of the International Conference on Computational Science 
and Applications. Heidelberg, Berlin, New York: Springer. June 20-23, 2011, Santander, 
Spain. 
8. Dillenbourg, P. (1999). Collaborative Learning: Cognitive and Computational Approaches. 
Advances in Learning and Instruction Series. New York, NY: Elsevier Science, Inc. 
9. Anderson, L. & Krathwohl, D. A. (2001) Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching and Assessing: 
A Revision of Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives New York: Longman. 
10. Jonassen, D. (1991). Objectivism vs. constructivism. Educational Technology. Research 
and Development, 39(3), 5–14. 
11. Bonwell, C.; Eison, J. (1991). Active Learning: Creating Excitement in the Classroom. 
AEHE-ERIC Higher Education Report No. 1. Washington, D.C.: Jossey-Bass. 
12. Kolb, D. A. (1984). Experiential learning: Experience as the source of learning and 
development. Journal of Organizational Behavior (Vol. 8). Prentice-Hall. 
13. Hmelo-Silver, C.E. (2004). Problem-based learning: What and How Do Students Learn?. 
Educational Psychology Review, 16(3), 235-266. Springer Netherlands. 
 


Klemke, R., & Kravčík, M. (2012, 18 September). Open 3D Environments for Competitive and Collaborative Educational Games. Presentation at S. Bocconi, R. Klamma, & Y. Bachvarova, Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Pedagogically-driven Serious Games (PDSG 2012). In conjunction with the Seventh European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL 2012), Saarbrücken, Germany.Educational games have a lot of potential to raise students’ motivation and improve the quality of education when applied properly. But finding a suitable game for a particular learning objective is not easy and development of a new one is expensive. In our university course a group of students developed a prototype of a serious gaming tool for architectural design, which is based on the Google Street View environment. With this tool teams can model 3D buildings, place them in real world images, share their results, and rate them. The solution provides a better contextualization of the model and paves a way towards integration with a full 3D environment, which should even more improve the serious gaming experience in the architectural design.GALA NoE, Surfnet/Kennisnet Innovation Programme 201

Open 3D Environments for Competitive and 
Collaborative Educational Games 
Roland Klemke, Milos Kravcik 
PDSG Workshop, Saarbrücken, 18.09.2012 
Game-based Learning 
Source: Nadolski 2010 
Game-based Learning 
Immersive learning, but 
high modelling costs for  
- 3d environments 
- Game logic 
- Learning content 
Is it possible to create a 3D learning game 
with freely available technologies / 
contents at low modelling cost? 
The Concept 
Use Google Streetview and the real world 
as a playground for interacting with  
virtual items in location-based games 
Benefits 
•  Low modelling costs due to  
existing environment 
•  Open API for content and 
application logic 
•  Integration with the real 
environment 
•  Easy to handle for teachers 
and students 
The Problem 
•  What, if real 3D models 
matter? 
•  What, if students have to 
create rather than 
consume? 
•  What, if results have to be 
evaluated by humans? 
•  What about architecture? 
Image: Evelyn Kamilaki, dffevelyn_kamilaki, flickr.com 
Architectural teams cooperate to 
compete with other teams Image: Charlie Vinz, vinzcha, flickr.com 
Architecture is competition driven 
Architecture is contextual: results of architectural 
processes are embedded in the real world 
Image: A-dit-ya, flickr.com 
The Vision 
•  Goal: Support architecture education in cooperative 
and competitive manner with a platform that provides 
contextual settings 
•  Approach: Extend StreetView in a manner, that it 
–  Supports embedding 3D models on the StreetView 
interface 
–  Support in-team collaboration on 3D models 
–  Supports cross-team rating 
Map 
Item 
Player 
Team 
Model 
Building 
Item 
Service 
Building 
Status 
Construction 
Item 
Extending StreetLearn’s object model 
Service infrastructure for 
creating, uploading, 
publishing, and rating models 
Extending StreetLearn’s user interface: 
Construction Area 
Extending StreetLearn’s user interface: 
Embedded 3D Model 
Extending StreetLearn’s user interface: 
Collaboration & Versioning 
Extending StreetLearn’s user interface: 
Competition & Rating 
Extending StreetLearn’s user interface: 
Competition & Rating 
Results 
•  3D add-on for StreetLearn succesfully prototyped by 
student team 
•  Collaboration and competition features realised 
•  Status: preliminary, but feedback from architectural 
students promising 
Next Steps 
•  User interface should be better integrated to provide 
better contextualisation  
–  currently, 3D models appears in soft-popup but should 
be really embedded 
•  Possible candidates for better integration might be 
realised in Google Earth 
–  Support for 3D models natively included 
–  Different application architecture required 
Mapping to workshop focus 
StreetLearn Platform 
development 
StreetLearn Game 
authoring 
Game 
Mechanics 
Pedagogic 
principles 
Storytelling Pedagogic design 
Game-based 
learning experience 
AI Agents? 
Thank you! 
 
Roland Klemke 
Center of Learning Sciences and 
Technology 
Open Universiteit Nederland 
Roland.Klemke@ou.nl 
 
 
Milos Kravcik 
Advanced Community Information 
Systems (ACIS) 
RWTH Aachen University 
kravcik@dbis.rwth-aachen.de 
 


https://research.ou.nl/files/947782/klemke-kravcik-pdgs-cr.pdf

Open 3D Environments for Competitive and Collaborative Educational Games

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

NARCIS

Open University of the Netherlands Research Portal

Open University of the Netherlands Research Portal

DSpace at Open Universiteit Nederland

DSpace at Open Universiteit Nederland