Scratch

Videogames, as a new and playful interactive language, have great potential in the education field. On the one hand, we can find educational videogames to cover almost the whole spectrum of topics offered by colleges and academies (although they are used mainly at home and not in the academic environment). On the other hand, playing videogames is in itself a recreational way to generate technical competencies and teach the use of a whole new “digital language.” Depending on different countries and cultures, there is a tendency to implement this technology in educational centres in varying degrees. In order to exemplify this implementation, the authors look at “Scratch,” a creative videogame program for children with a big community behind it. In the conclusion, they focus on the introduction of videogame language in the educational context, not as educational videogames but as a tool to learn digital literacy and contemporary society.

Benefits of Virtual Worlds in Educational Environments

In this chapter, the authors describe the project of a virtual world that they developed in their university and with their students. In this work, they joined concepts like social networks and virtual reality, creating a virtual model of the University Miguel Hernandez (UMH), where students are able to walk around the campus, inside the buildings, chat with other students, and moreover, use videoconferencing rooms where students talk and see other students in the same virtual world. The authors describe this project, called UMHvirtual (available in http://virtual.umh.es), which has been supervised by the authors, implemented by a group of students, and focused on all the university students.

User’s Experience with a 3D Educational Mobile Game to Support Spatial Instruction

Spatial abilities are critical skills in scientific and technical fields. In recent studies, the role of computer games, particularly those with 3-D simulations, have been examined for their impact on the development of spatial skills. The work presented in this chapter describes the design and user evaluation of a 3D construction mobile game called iCube. A trial version was brought out and evaluated by twenty-two students. Users pointed out that the game is useful for improvement of spatial ability and is fun. However, some difficulties arose with use of the tactile screen, as fingerprints caused problems while interacting with the game’s 3D environment. The results revealed that it is necessary to have this item in mind during the game’s design, where screen action is continuous.

Facilitation of Trust in Gaming Situations

Games are inherently engaging and, when crafted to do so, provide an experiential, mediated learning space that is effective and fun. This chapter explores game-based learning and the role of the facilitator in optimizing learning. As referees, they make sure games proceed in a fair and orderly manner. As teachers, they look for teachable moments to ‘scaffold’ learning. As mentors, they debrief what happened to enhance learning and ensure psychological safety. The author reviews the literature and her practice as an educational psychologist to examine therapeutic board games and socio-emotional learning. The Life-Space Interview and Emotional First Aid are put forward as effective debriefing tools. An argument is made for the importance of face-to-face games and attention is drawn to concerns about excessive screen time.

Beauty or the Beast

Educational games are often less attractive than entertainment games in visuals, gameplay, and other aspects, but do we need entertainment-level beauties in our education or are beasts sufficient? To identify the importance of attraction for educational games, the authors offer the results of a comparative analysis of five educational games used and evaluated from 2005-2010 (N=754). They operationalized attraction through statements in which players were asked to rate the games’ visual, gameplay, and user interface attractiveness. While some scholars argue that for game-based education to become successful, educational games need to be visually more attractive, the results of the analysis show the opposite. For educational games, attraction is of relatively low importance. The authors further found that gameplay is the most important aspect of attraction and visuals the least. These results contribute to the debate amongst designers and educators on what priorities to set when considering game-based education.

Enriching the Experience in Video Games Based on Playability Development Techniques

Video games are the most economically profitable entertainment industry. The nature of their design means that user experience is enriched by emotional, cultural, and other subjective factors that make design and / or evaluation difficult using traditional methods commonly used in interactive systems. It is therefore necessary to know how to apply Playability in order to design, analyze, optimize, and adapt it to a player’s preferences. In this chapter, the authors present a way to perform UX based on Playability techniques by adding hedonic factors that enrich the development of video games. The aim is to easily and cost-effectively analyze the different degrees of Playability within a game and determine how player experience is affected by different game elements. These results can be applied in the educational field where the experience of the pupils with educational video games is a crucial factor for the success of the learning process.

Educating University Students

Recent technological advances mean mobile phones can now be thought of as computers that fit in pockets. With the Apple iPhone and the Google Android Phone leading the way, mobile phones today offer many technological possibilities including SMS messaging, browsing the World Wide Web, watching and making videos, downloading and playing educational games, partaking in discussion forums, blogging, etc. Educators are currently looking at the mobile phone and other mobile technologies (such as netbooks, PDAs, Nintendo DS, SONY PSP, media players, iPod Touch, voting systems, and specialist cameras) as a way of immersing the student in the learning process. These new mediums allow students to record, organise, access, share, and reflect on work-based learning experiences. The aim of this chapter is to examine how universities can use mobile-learning tools, with a view to engaging students in the learning process while also developing their meaning-making system.

Laboratory Experiments in CSCL Activities

Several groupware tools have been implemented within Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) research groups in order to test ideas and concepts currently being studied. It is very important to perform pilot-evaluations with these systems. The CSCW Lab is an environment for evaluating groupware within research groups. Four dimensions in assessing groupware were identified: context, collaboration, usability, and cultural impacts. In this chapter, the authors present a proposal to detail the collaboration level, specifically for CSCL domain applications. Understanding and analyzing the collaborative learning process requires a fine-grained sequential analysis of the group interaction in the context of learning goals. Several researchers in the area of cooperative work take as success criterion the quality of the group outcome. Nevertheless, recent findings are giving more importance to the quality of the “cooperation process” itself. The proposed model includes a set of guidelines to evaluate the usage of CSCL tools within a collaboration process defined along with the learning objectives. The authors have defined an experiment with a software tool instrumented to gather information that allowed them to verify the presence of a set of cooperation indicators, which in turn helped to determine the quality of the work process.

Enhancement of Adaptation and Monitoring in Game-Based Learning Environments

This new way of learning changes habits, offers new opportunities to use collaborative tools, allowing the students to co-construct knowledge efficiently. In this chapter, the authors describe an example of game-based environment that they have developed. They then give examples of uses of collaborative tools in this environment and give details on how to enhance them. The authors focus on two aspects: the monitoring of the collaborative activity, where the teacher applies his/her own strategies in order to monitor the collaborative activity; and the adaptation of the game according to the learners’ profiles.

Playability Design Patterns

Learning through play is currently an effective and attractive educational strategy. Recently, many educational video games have failed because methods of analysis have not been used to discuss playability level in a structured way. Ensuring a good player experience characterized by playability requires cooperation and collaboration between game designers and educators. To this end, the authors have proposed a new set of patterns to support educational video game design and analysis. These patterns aim to facilitate the development of educational video games, summarize the essential information and requirements needed to understand a particular problem and the proposed solution, and present the interrelationships between educational video game components and playability attributes.