Gamification and game based learning are the more and more ferquently used terms in different teaching and learning environments. Yet as it is often the case with suddenly emerging terms, we are not always entirely conscient about their exact meaning, origins and content. The Gamification and GBL course was extremely helpful to understand the different components of these concepts. But first and foremost it tought us that learning through gaming and playing is not at all a new feature: theachers and educators willing to create a more informal and motivating learning enviroment, have always been using gaming – conscoiously or inconscously - in their curricula.
The course brought us into the reality covered by these old/new terms; not only by presenting the different approaches on gaming, gaming methods and tools to be applied in the teaching environment, but also by introducing us the technical and creative part of gaming: the coding of games, the basic elements of game design and the use of easily accessible applications to create our own games. Unfortunately, the structure of the course has not always been clear, and this might be the reason why at the end trainees felt rather confused about the use of some of the different information they had learned during the 5.5 days of the training. Unfortunately, some technical aspects (especially the use of online and mobile applications) were overemphasized, why others, such as the practical integration of gaming into the general pedagogical curricula were less articulated.
When looking back at all the information obtained I assume that in spite of these lacking the course gave a complex background on the topic and as such will be very useful for CRN and especially, for the further development of our EURBANITIES project. As another important positive aspect, the course had been organized in a way to alternate interactive practice oriented lessons with more theoretical presentations, and different forms of gaming and playing were basic part of the curricula. Every day we practiced some sort of creative gaming activities, from simple children toys used in primary schools, through more complex role games till the design of serious games. Through this method, trainers transferred us the main messages of GBL and gamification: not only they showed us how learning by playing is funny and in the same time useful to deepen our masteries, they also made us understand that the most evident way of speaking and learning about gaming is by letting us go and enjoying the game itself.
The terminology As mentioned above, the notions used during the course have gained great popularity during the past decades although the concept behind them: “learning by playing”, is one of the most natural things in the world practiced by all of us since birth. Three terms need clarification here: gamification, game based learning and serious game. They are strongly interlinked and their relationship could be illustrated as follows:
Serious games
What are these “gaming elements”? Being fun, being challenging, motivating, full of surprises, offering rewards. (“Use of Gamification Tools”, Ramon Pavia Sala)
According to certain approaches, in teaching, the three concepts (gamification, GBL and serious games) are strongly overlapping each other, and there is no real need to differentiate them. What counts finally is what these approaches offer in facilitating teaching and learning. [1] These elements are as follows:
Game based learning / learning by gaming – offlineThe course offered regular occasions to experience diverse offline gaming and playing methods to be used in class or in any other training environment.
There are indefinite versions of role plays to be adapted to the teaching environment according to the subject of teaching, the age and orientation of the pupils, the time frame, the place, etc. The imitation of reality being in the core of role games, their preparation is important: bringing some tools reminding the pupils to the subject of the game, and letting them time to get into the story are important details to keep in mind. During the course “Acting out - The Way to integrate skills in real life contexts recreated in class” of Imma Piquer we practiced a simple game reproducing the reality of a restaurant with tools borrowed from children’s games: small plates, folks and knives, real tables, plastic food, etc. The teacher had even prepared a menu card with the images of the foods. This game is normally used in language teaching for small children but adults had also fun when playing it.
On another day at the course “Learning by doing” by Carlota Hernandez we were offered the occasion to practice several rather well known logical games and table games and to see how these games can be applied in the teaching environment. Although these games also are mostly fitting small children, some of them can be imagined as nice icebreaking activities in a training course for adults as well:
Find out what is behind the wall Tell good stories and receive M&M as reward
Find shapes and colors with a vending machine Select good answers by dropping the ball in the right box
Gamification with digital toolsAlthough the above examples show how extended the possibilities of gaming in teaching are, the concepts of gamification and GBL are nowadays mostly linked to the use of digital tools and online applications. In this sense, gamification in teaching is strongly interlinked with digital learning. While the latter does not only develop teachers’ and pupils’ digital literacy, but also offers alternative teaching methods based on participation, creativity and innovation[2], gamification will add to this the gaming elements as described above: game mechanisms, challenge, risk, problem solving, rewards, repetition. Here again, borders between the two concepts cannot be clearly defined.
Ricard Garcia in his course “Learning Languages through Games”[3] presented a variety of digital tools he normally uses in language teaching but which can also be applied for any other subjects, for instance, human sciences, geography, history etc. The different storytelling platforms and games that can function as applications for individual writing but mostly serve for sharing and co-creating stories in form of community writing or gaming might also be extremely useful in adult education:
http://www.inklestudios.com/inklewriter/ - you can write stories with different options and share it to be continued by another person.
https://www.storywars.net/ - you can choose a story and continue it by writing chapters, or you can vote for existing stories.
http://foldingstory.com/ - you can create stories, or add parts to began stories and read stories.
https://storium.com – a community game for creating common stories
https://spark.adobe.com storytelling site – describing and sharing stories
Several digital tools are already widely used in schools for facilitating teaching and communication between teachers and pupils, such as Kahoo, a rather popular app functioning as a squeeze game tool for the consolidation of knowledge while creating a competition game atmosphere in the class. Edpuzzle is also a tool to be used for deepening and controlling knowledge by including questions right into a video.
Socrative student, a mobile app permits the realization of online squeezes for classes in distance. It was experienced in practice in the Museum of Science of Barcelona during the course.
This and similar mobile applications might be of great interest for adult trainings as well, as they permit a high flexibility by linking trainers and trainees even if they are not in the same place or the same city. Their use is however limited: these applications are only adaptable to the latest mobile devices, and are strongly depending on the presence of stable internet connections on both sides (the trainer and the trainees). In case of weak connectivity or dated devices, the whole teaching process may be suspended.
Technical barriers can thus be considered as the main obstacles of the spread of M(obile)learning in gamification (“Mlearning in gamification”, Ramon Pavia). Even within the course, this problem occurred several times: Socrative or Snackson applications couldn’t be downloaded by trainees possessing more than one-year-old mobile devices preventing them from fulfilling the related tasks within the course.
In spite of these inconveniences, mobile applications still obtained a big emphasis during the course. In the same time, participants agreed that the use of such devices is in general not absolutely necessary for applying GBL and gamification methods in their teaching activities.
Serious games and GBLFrom the perspective of CRN and EURBANITIES, the most interesting examples for GBL are of course the serious games and among them the games presenting existing social and environmental challenges. Many of these games can be found on Games for Change site.
Among the various games to be tested on this site, let’s mention Syrian Journey, a game willing to present the humiliations and difficulties refugees must face to get out of their horrible situation in Syria. The game shows how the reasons of the success or failure of refugees is lacking of any logical sequence of events. Very simply, everything might happen like this or like that. From the gaming perspective, it seems that the main purpose of the Syrian Journey is less to play then to learn about the situation: written down in a short article, the same message would have passed.
This is a specific characteristic of certain serious games strongly criticized by Ramon Pavia Sala in his course “Mlearning and Gamification”: the weakness or the lacking of certain game mechanisms, such as the surprise or the reward, may deprive the game of its basic elements and, in extreme cases, it is even questionable if we can still speak about a real game…
Keeping this important aspect in mind, each serious game needs to be evaluated in its concrete place, according to the purposes it had been created for, and the ways the public accepted it. The Migrant Tail for instance is a serious game with similar objectives as the Syrian Journey, but here the game is more constructed, game mechanisms are more developed.
According to Ramon Pavia Salva, video games with a commercial, educational or health purpose, had been popular between 2000-2012; these games are however not too funny, they do not contain any real solution, risks, surprises, shortly said, there are not enough gaming elements in them. They are 100% focused on the content, and the gaming aspect disappeared. At that period, a deep border existed yet between serious games and the commercial ones created for fun and entertainment.
Today, the best serious games are also containing entertaining elements. The Games for Change site contains several examples for this new “approach”: such as SimCityEdu or Ciclania or Electrocity game. GBL itself becomes a more and more commercializing market. Other information on serious games are also provided on the site of Serious Games Institute.
Game designAlthough first of all dedicated to teachers and educators, the course also gave a little insight into the game development and game design process. These information were partly presented in theoretical classes: “Learning Game Concept Design” by Adso Fernandez, “Creating games meant to be played” by José Ignazio Montes; partly in practical exercises: “From Coding Games to Game Making” and “Use of Gamification Tools” by Ramon Pavia. As formulated at the end of the course, trainees had difficulties to absorb and synthetize all the information obtained concerning game design. First, because the structure of these classes was not too clear. Second, because trainers did not provide any printed or electronic version or synthesis of their presentations, making extremely difficult for trainees to capture the concepts and expressions linked to this specific topic. In spite of these inconveniences, the attempt to introduce the technical background of GBL to the participants has really been positive, especially from the point of view of EURBANITIES project that itself is partly focusing on game development.
Here are some main ideas that might be useful for our project:
Game design must pay attention to include the following elements that also serve as added value for GBL compared to traditional teaching:
When constructing a serious game, the following elements have to be taken into consideration:
Conception of a serious game’s contentThe most interesting exercise from the EURBANITIES point of view had unfortunately been scheduled on the last day of the course, and could not have been entirely completed because of lacking of time.
The idea was to create the content and concept of a serious game with a teaching content by going step by step as follows:
The webstory maker site Adope Spark has been used for the creation of this game. This site permits to share writing, pictures, videos etc, linked to the story.
The conception process and the steps described above strongly reflect the game development methodology that has been recently used by the Eurbanities consortium for the construction of the EURBANITIES game.
ConclusionThe above synthesis could not include all the details, websites, applications, and practices that have been mentioned during the gamification and GBL course. The course is clearly positively evaluated from the point of view of the richness and diversity of the information obtained. What has been less evident is the structure of the course and the follow up of the lessons. As mentioned several times in the above description, the themes were often mixed up, they didn’t follow each other in a logical way and some information were overemphasized. Too much stress was laid on the use of digital applications and on the technical details of game development and design, and too less practical information were transferred on the pedagogical content of GBL: how to build a good game for teaching? How to logically create the learning content? How to include the game into the teaching curriculum? These aspects have been only mentioned but were not dealt with in details.
Globally, the 5,5 day-long course was of great interest from the point of view of the EURBANITIES project, and it offered a good base for improving our gaming competences in the future. It also offered some interesting professional contacts, that will be useful for the evaluation and dissemination of EURBANITIES game on the one hand, and for eventual further projects, on the other.
[1] Kapil Basin 2014: https://www.learningsolutionsmag.com/articles/1337/; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5mcVZIxN9U
[2] M. Barthel (ed) (2016): Improving the Digital Dimension in Education, „We are All Digital natives” Erasmus + KA2, Comparative Research Network, Berlin. ISBN 978-3-946832-00-3
[3] https://prezi.com/wa5pfb6u9mjd/using-digital-games-to-learn-languages/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy
The course brought us into the reality covered by these old/new terms; not only by presenting the different approaches on gaming, gaming methods and tools to be applied in the teaching environment, but also by introducing us the technical and creative part of gaming: the coding of games, the basic elements of game design and the use of easily accessible applications to create our own games. Unfortunately, the structure of the course has not always been clear, and this might be the reason why at the end trainees felt rather confused about the use of some of the different information they had learned during the 5.5 days of the training. Unfortunately, some technical aspects (especially the use of online and mobile applications) were overemphasized, why others, such as the practical integration of gaming into the general pedagogical curricula were less articulated.
When looking back at all the information obtained I assume that in spite of these lacking the course gave a complex background on the topic and as such will be very useful for CRN and especially, for the further development of our EURBANITIES project. As another important positive aspect, the course had been organized in a way to alternate interactive practice oriented lessons with more theoretical presentations, and different forms of gaming and playing were basic part of the curricula. Every day we practiced some sort of creative gaming activities, from simple children toys used in primary schools, through more complex role games till the design of serious games. Through this method, trainers transferred us the main messages of GBL and gamification: not only they showed us how learning by playing is funny and in the same time useful to deepen our masteries, they also made us understand that the most evident way of speaking and learning about gaming is by letting us go and enjoying the game itself.
The terminology As mentioned above, the notions used during the course have gained great popularity during the past decades although the concept behind them: “learning by playing”, is one of the most natural things in the world practiced by all of us since birth. Three terms need clarification here: gamification, game based learning and serious game. They are strongly interlinked and their relationship could be illustrated as follows:
Serious games
What are these “gaming elements”? Being fun, being challenging, motivating, full of surprises, offering rewards. (“Use of Gamification Tools”, Ramon Pavia Sala)
According to certain approaches, in teaching, the three concepts (gamification, GBL and serious games) are strongly overlapping each other, and there is no real need to differentiate them. What counts finally is what these approaches offer in facilitating teaching and learning. [1] These elements are as follows:
- Transfer of knowledge in a funny way
- Use of game mechanisms: points, rewards, leaderboards, surprise…
- Making the pupils/students/trainees motivated to learn through the game and the rewards
- Learning is concentrated around a problem solving attitude.
- Gaming is based on permanent repetition, offering the possibility of experiencing different scenarios, different solutions for the same challenge. Repetition permits the consolidation of the mastery.
- Interactivity, participative learning
- Gaming teaches pupils how to take risks, how to deal with the consequences of their decisions and how to conclude and reorient their actions.
Game based learning / learning by gaming – offlineThe course offered regular occasions to experience diverse offline gaming and playing methods to be used in class or in any other training environment.
There are indefinite versions of role plays to be adapted to the teaching environment according to the subject of teaching, the age and orientation of the pupils, the time frame, the place, etc. The imitation of reality being in the core of role games, their preparation is important: bringing some tools reminding the pupils to the subject of the game, and letting them time to get into the story are important details to keep in mind. During the course “Acting out - The Way to integrate skills in real life contexts recreated in class” of Imma Piquer we practiced a simple game reproducing the reality of a restaurant with tools borrowed from children’s games: small plates, folks and knives, real tables, plastic food, etc. The teacher had even prepared a menu card with the images of the foods. This game is normally used in language teaching for small children but adults had also fun when playing it.
On another day at the course “Learning by doing” by Carlota Hernandez we were offered the occasion to practice several rather well known logical games and table games and to see how these games can be applied in the teaching environment. Although these games also are mostly fitting small children, some of them can be imagined as nice icebreaking activities in a training course for adults as well:
Find out what is behind the wall Tell good stories and receive M&M as reward
Find shapes and colors with a vending machine Select good answers by dropping the ball in the right box
Gamification with digital toolsAlthough the above examples show how extended the possibilities of gaming in teaching are, the concepts of gamification and GBL are nowadays mostly linked to the use of digital tools and online applications. In this sense, gamification in teaching is strongly interlinked with digital learning. While the latter does not only develop teachers’ and pupils’ digital literacy, but also offers alternative teaching methods based on participation, creativity and innovation[2], gamification will add to this the gaming elements as described above: game mechanisms, challenge, risk, problem solving, rewards, repetition. Here again, borders between the two concepts cannot be clearly defined.
Ricard Garcia in his course “Learning Languages through Games”[3] presented a variety of digital tools he normally uses in language teaching but which can also be applied for any other subjects, for instance, human sciences, geography, history etc. The different storytelling platforms and games that can function as applications for individual writing but mostly serve for sharing and co-creating stories in form of community writing or gaming might also be extremely useful in adult education:
http://www.inklestudios.com/inklewriter/ - you can write stories with different options and share it to be continued by another person.
https://www.storywars.net/ - you can choose a story and continue it by writing chapters, or you can vote for existing stories.
http://foldingstory.com/ - you can create stories, or add parts to began stories and read stories.
https://storium.com – a community game for creating common stories
https://spark.adobe.com storytelling site – describing and sharing stories
Several digital tools are already widely used in schools for facilitating teaching and communication between teachers and pupils, such as Kahoo, a rather popular app functioning as a squeeze game tool for the consolidation of knowledge while creating a competition game atmosphere in the class. Edpuzzle is also a tool to be used for deepening and controlling knowledge by including questions right into a video.
Socrative student, a mobile app permits the realization of online squeezes for classes in distance. It was experienced in practice in the Museum of Science of Barcelona during the course.
This and similar mobile applications might be of great interest for adult trainings as well, as they permit a high flexibility by linking trainers and trainees even if they are not in the same place or the same city. Their use is however limited: these applications are only adaptable to the latest mobile devices, and are strongly depending on the presence of stable internet connections on both sides (the trainer and the trainees). In case of weak connectivity or dated devices, the whole teaching process may be suspended.
Technical barriers can thus be considered as the main obstacles of the spread of M(obile)learning in gamification (“Mlearning in gamification”, Ramon Pavia). Even within the course, this problem occurred several times: Socrative or Snackson applications couldn’t be downloaded by trainees possessing more than one-year-old mobile devices preventing them from fulfilling the related tasks within the course.
In spite of these inconveniences, mobile applications still obtained a big emphasis during the course. In the same time, participants agreed that the use of such devices is in general not absolutely necessary for applying GBL and gamification methods in their teaching activities.
Serious games and GBLFrom the perspective of CRN and EURBANITIES, the most interesting examples for GBL are of course the serious games and among them the games presenting existing social and environmental challenges. Many of these games can be found on Games for Change site.
Among the various games to be tested on this site, let’s mention Syrian Journey, a game willing to present the humiliations and difficulties refugees must face to get out of their horrible situation in Syria. The game shows how the reasons of the success or failure of refugees is lacking of any logical sequence of events. Very simply, everything might happen like this or like that. From the gaming perspective, it seems that the main purpose of the Syrian Journey is less to play then to learn about the situation: written down in a short article, the same message would have passed.
This is a specific characteristic of certain serious games strongly criticized by Ramon Pavia Sala in his course “Mlearning and Gamification”: the weakness or the lacking of certain game mechanisms, such as the surprise or the reward, may deprive the game of its basic elements and, in extreme cases, it is even questionable if we can still speak about a real game…
Keeping this important aspect in mind, each serious game needs to be evaluated in its concrete place, according to the purposes it had been created for, and the ways the public accepted it. The Migrant Tail for instance is a serious game with similar objectives as the Syrian Journey, but here the game is more constructed, game mechanisms are more developed.
According to Ramon Pavia Salva, video games with a commercial, educational or health purpose, had been popular between 2000-2012; these games are however not too funny, they do not contain any real solution, risks, surprises, shortly said, there are not enough gaming elements in them. They are 100% focused on the content, and the gaming aspect disappeared. At that period, a deep border existed yet between serious games and the commercial ones created for fun and entertainment.
Today, the best serious games are also containing entertaining elements. The Games for Change site contains several examples for this new “approach”: such as SimCityEdu or Ciclania or Electrocity game. GBL itself becomes a more and more commercializing market. Other information on serious games are also provided on the site of Serious Games Institute.
Game designAlthough first of all dedicated to teachers and educators, the course also gave a little insight into the game development and game design process. These information were partly presented in theoretical classes: “Learning Game Concept Design” by Adso Fernandez, “Creating games meant to be played” by José Ignazio Montes; partly in practical exercises: “From Coding Games to Game Making” and “Use of Gamification Tools” by Ramon Pavia. As formulated at the end of the course, trainees had difficulties to absorb and synthetize all the information obtained concerning game design. First, because the structure of these classes was not too clear. Second, because trainers did not provide any printed or electronic version or synthesis of their presentations, making extremely difficult for trainees to capture the concepts and expressions linked to this specific topic. In spite of these inconveniences, the attempt to introduce the technical background of GBL to the participants has really been positive, especially from the point of view of EURBANITIES project that itself is partly focusing on game development.
Here are some main ideas that might be useful for our project:
Game design must pay attention to include the following elements that also serve as added value for GBL compared to traditional teaching:
- Mystery – attracting curiosity, engage users to play
- Action – not to start with the theory, first engage action
- Challenge
- Being at risk
- Uncertainty of outcome
- Opportunity for mastery – to manage all
- Visible signs of progress
- Emotional content
When constructing a serious game, the following elements have to be taken into consideration:
- Identifying the target group of the teaching
- Identifying the pedagogical objectives and if the game would develop the cognitive, affective or psychomotor capacities of the pupils
- Logically building the flow of the game: the story, the characters, and the spaces of the game have to be precised
- It is important to create a video on game instructions
- Implementation of a good score system to ensure interactivity
- Curricular integration: it is important to know when, in what conditions the game will be used as a resource in education? The game designers will have to decide if the gaming part will be a special session within the curriculum, or it will be integrated into the other sessions.
Conception of a serious game’s contentThe most interesting exercise from the EURBANITIES point of view had unfortunately been scheduled on the last day of the course, and could not have been entirely completed because of lacking of time.
The idea was to create the content and concept of a serious game with a teaching content by going step by step as follows:
- Definition of the concrete subject and learning objectives of the game
- Creation of a story, because there is no game without a story
- Based on the story, creation of the game plot: the main actors (Hero, enemy, helper etc), and the main scenes of the game
- Identifying the game’s challenges, by keeping in mind that the game’s challenges are not the same as the story’s ones. Based on the challenges, definition of the tasks of the game.
- Fixing the game’s rules and the obstacles to accomplish the tasks
- Creation of the scoring system
- Identifying the rewards, designing them with badges
The webstory maker site Adope Spark has been used for the creation of this game. This site permits to share writing, pictures, videos etc, linked to the story.
The conception process and the steps described above strongly reflect the game development methodology that has been recently used by the Eurbanities consortium for the construction of the EURBANITIES game.
ConclusionThe above synthesis could not include all the details, websites, applications, and practices that have been mentioned during the gamification and GBL course. The course is clearly positively evaluated from the point of view of the richness and diversity of the information obtained. What has been less evident is the structure of the course and the follow up of the lessons. As mentioned several times in the above description, the themes were often mixed up, they didn’t follow each other in a logical way and some information were overemphasized. Too much stress was laid on the use of digital applications and on the technical details of game development and design, and too less practical information were transferred on the pedagogical content of GBL: how to build a good game for teaching? How to logically create the learning content? How to include the game into the teaching curriculum? These aspects have been only mentioned but were not dealt with in details.
Globally, the 5,5 day-long course was of great interest from the point of view of the EURBANITIES project, and it offered a good base for improving our gaming competences in the future. It also offered some interesting professional contacts, that will be useful for the evaluation and dissemination of EURBANITIES game on the one hand, and for eventual further projects, on the other.
[1] Kapil Basin 2014: https://www.learningsolutionsmag.com/articles/1337/; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5mcVZIxN9U
[2] M. Barthel (ed) (2016): Improving the Digital Dimension in Education, „We are All Digital natives” Erasmus + KA2, Comparative Research Network, Berlin. ISBN 978-3-946832-00-3
[3] https://prezi.com/wa5pfb6u9mjd/using-digital-games-to-learn-languages/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy