Breaking Educational Barriers with Contextualised, Pervasive and Gameful Learning (BEACONING)

Funder

Organizational Unit

Publications

Identifying immersive environments’ most relevant research topics: an instrument to query researchers and practitioners

Publication . Gaspar, Horácio; Morgado, Leonel; São Mamede, Henrique; Manjón, Baltasar; Gütl, Christian

This paper provides an instrument for ascertaining researchers’ perspectives on the relative relevance of technological challenges facing immersive environments in view of their adoption in learning contexts, along three dimensions: access, content production, and deployment. It described its theoretical grounding and expert-review process, from a set of previously-identified challenges and expert feedback cycles. The paper details the motivation, setup, and methods employed, as well as the issues detected in the cycles and how they were addressed while developing the instrument. As a research instrument, it aims to be employed across diverse communities of research and practice, helping direct research efforts and hence contribute to wider use of immersive environments in learning, and possibly contribute towards the development of news and more adequate systems.

2018-06-26Conference object

Open access

iLRN 2018 Montana. Workshop, long and short paper, and poster proceedings from the fourth immersive learning research network conference

Publication . Beck, Dennis; Allison, Colin; Morgado, Leonel; Peña-Rios, Anasol; Ogle, Todd; Richter, Jonathon; Gütl, Christian

Workshop, short paper, and long paper proceedings

2018-06Book

Open access

Authoring game-based learning activities that are manageable by teachers

Publication . Cardoso, Pedro; Morgado, Leonel; Coelho, António

The great ambition of using games as the cornerstone of education is hindered by its associated teaching workload. The BEACONING project developed a framework based on an authoring tool for gamified lesson paths, which has been rolled-out in large scale across Europe. It includes stages for planning game-based educational activities, plus their deployment, monitoring, and assessment. Games are great tools for learning and as such many teachers wish to employ them in their teaching practices. Notwithstanding, using games in education is hard. It is hard to plan the time and the teachers’ tasks; the students’ activities; to keep track of what each student is doing; to assess and provide feedback, and so on – and all these obstacles encumber and limit educational adoption of games [1]. The BEACONING project [L1] acknowledges this and created the concept of a gamified lesson path [2], by linking game plots (the narrative and level design) provided by game development companies with educational activities within a triadic assessment model [3]. Using an authoring tool developed at INESC TEC (Figure 1), a learning designer creates a gamified lesson path by selecting a game plot, linking learning activities structured as missions and quests into it, and finally by associating those activities with specific learning goals and challenges (mini-games). Learning designers are either experts at creating educational content, within companies and organisations, or teachers with training in this area. By selecting a gamified lesson path, teachers can automatically deploy games to their students, adapting them to specific individual requirements. Not only students receive the games as part of educational activities from their teachers, but this deployment is also linked to the learning management platforms: teachers can track which students have not yet started learning within a gamified lesson plan, which ones are currently amidst it and where, and which students have finished it and how. Students can also track which teachers and courses have assigned them gamified lesson plans, and how they are progressing in each. All of this linking is done via anonymization, using the BEACONING platform as middleware, so that gaming companies can deploy games to individual students over the Web without actually knowing who each student is: individual details are kept within the learning management system and retrieved directly by the game on students’ smartphones, without being sent to the companies or even to the middleware. BEACONING provides each student’s game with information on the actual web call to retrieve information such as player names, but this transit of information occurs solely between the student’s smartphone and the school’s learning management system. By using BEACONING to track students’ progress, teachers can better manage their time and effort allocation when employing videogames in school, thus reducing their workload and empowering them to use these as a reliable and regular pedagogic approach “anytime and anywhere”. This authoring and deployment pipeline have now been successfully rolled out in large-scale testing across Europe (Figure 2) [L2]. BEACONING’s prototype and authoring pipeline approach holds the potential for application in many other non-traditional learning activities. Beyond gaming, we are exploring and expanding this approach to enable widespread deployment of active learning, location-based learning, immersive environments, outdoor activities, and more.

2020-01Journal article

Open access

Serious pervasive games

Publication . Coelho, António; Rodrigues, Rui Manuel Gonçalves Calejo; Nóbrega, Rui; Jacob, João; Morgado, Leonel; Cardoso, Pedro; Van Zeller, Maria; Santos, Liliana; Sousa, A. Augusto

Serious Pervasive Games extend themagic circle (Huizinga, 1938) to the players’ context and surrounding environment. The blend of both physical and fictive game worlds provides a push in player engagement and promotes situated learning approaches. Space and time, as well as social context, acquire a more meaningful impact on the gameplay. From pervasive learning towards science communication with location-based games, this article presents research and case studies that exemplify their benefits and related problems. Pervasive learning can be defined as “learning at the speed of need through formal, informal and social learning modalities” (Pontefract, 2013). The first case study—the BEACONING project—aims to contextualize the teaching and learning process, connecting it with problem-based game mechanics within STEM. The main goal of this project is to provide the missing connection between STEM subjects and real-world interactions and applications. The pedagogical foundation is supported on problem-based learning (PBL), in which active learning is in the center, and learners have to work with different tools and resources in order to solve problems (quests). Teachers create, facilitate, and assess pervasive and gamified learning activities (missions). Furthermore, these quests are gamified in order to provide non-linear game plots. In a second case study, we demonstrate and evaluate how natural heritage can benefit from pervasive games. This study is based on a set of location-based games for an existing natural park, which have been developed in order to provide enhanced experiences, as well as additional information about some species that are more difficult to observe or that are seasonal. Throughout the research and development of these projects, we have encountered and identified several problems, of different nature, present in pervasive games.

2020Journal article

Open access