Silence is Golden – where action speaks louder

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Yes was pretty quiet on the blogging side for the past 3 months. Was on the fast lane… not stopping for long anytime yet but taking a quick breather to reflect on what had happened so far and where I am at the moment.

Project works have been keeping me busy, on top of the usual administrative work, PhD examination and public engagement. And yes lots of traveling. I look at it as a Zelda adventure moving from one scene to another, entering one exciting doorway after another. Not without the usual stress and pressure. But I suppose the goal is bigger than the occasional upsets. Have always been glass half full – but I like to think that it is a more informed one. Though faith plays a key role as well- may not sit well with people who are working based on KPIs, but it seems to work so far.

Highlights from the past three months include the Coventry University Brussels office launch in April, where we showcased the fantastic portfolio the University has in applied research. I was also selfie-tastic on the day- as you do!

This launch was also followed up by a visit from the lab in June to explore opportunities for partnership with EU organisations, which also includes a session with the EU Commission DG Education.

May has also been busy with long haul travels, which started with the ChangSchoolTalks2018 in Toronto, where I keynoted alongside other gamification colleagues- those that I respect in the circuit. You know who you are! Great enthusiasm from the participants and clearly more work in the domain of serious games and gamification should be followed up in Toronto exploiting existing talents. Inspiring.

Beaconing’s Location-Based Games was also demo-ed in Toronto, where the link to the game was released via Twitter.

From Toronto, I moved on to Singapore and Malaysia, where I participated in a site visit for our Newton Funded CreativeCulture project. It was such a humbling experience working with the schools and community in a the remote Long Lamai Village in Borneo Malaysia. The potential of co-creativity inspired by play and games has been realised there, where teachers were able to remix existing games and create new games for teaching and learning STEM. This school is one of the three schools in rural Borneo that we are engaging with under the project, which is a spin off initiative from Gamechangers. I will have a separate blog post on the experience and lessons learnt.

You can watch a 17-minute long video capturing some of our adventures there:

When I was still in Malaysia, we have also managed to submit another Newton funding bid that is expanding the GameChangers approach for promoting social values, innovation and enterprise in Mexico. Another Gamification colleague from the circuit is part of the bid.

June was particularly interesting as well, where I was a member of the examination panel of an industrial PhD in Gamification in Barcelona- which I think was insightful. Well done Alberto! The gamification framework based on an agile approach will prove to be useful when it comes to being disruptive in the development and implementation of real solutions. Check out the Fraggle framework. Looking forward to the journal papers and perhaps full validation of the framework by gamification experts.

Then finally, the launch of the Centre for Advanced Computational Science at Manchester Metropolitan University on 27th June. Fantastic work by the team. A pleasure to be a member of the External Advisory Group, where games is one of the strands under the Centre’s Human Computer Interfaces lab.

Co-creativity inspired by play and games

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Recently keynoted at the ever so successful Remix Play 2 Summit at Coventry University’s Disruptive Media Learning Lab. Huge congratulations to Samantha Clarke and the team! And also a big thank you to all the speakers! I will have a separate post on the event soon with photos, twitter feeds and some statistics!

We submitted an abstract to ECGBL 2018, inspired by this keynote piece aiming to discuss the importance of a co-creative process inspired by playful and gameful perspectives.

The abstract is as follows:

Co-Creativity with playful and gameful inspirations

This paper will discuss the importance of co-creativity in facilitating an engaging learning process based on the GameChangers initiative (gamify.org.uk) part-funded by the Higher Education Funding Council of England (HEFCE).  Taking into account the relationships between play, technology and learning, the design of the initiative itself fully embraces and accommodates for the creation and development of games of any typology (board games, card games, digital games, etc.)  and playful solutions (gamified products) as freely chosen by the participants, be them students or staff. By engaging in these practices, participants were intended to obtain valuable knowledge in creative and collaborative problem solving, experience game design and development process and even, possibly, address real challenges and opportunities in their communities. The focus however is on the creative process rather than the end products/solutions produced by the participants. The paper will specifically discuss the methodology and findings from an experimental module developed based on the approach involving level 2 undergraduate students (n=30) from the different schools and faculties at Coventry University, UK. Based on the qualitative feedback and reflections collected in week 5 and week 10 of the modules, the co-creative process inspired by play and games demonstrates that through the process, students discover the importance of elements such as empathy, purpose, meaning, art and teamwork in their learning regardless of the specific disciplines they are pursuing.

The Remix Play keynote slides:

Trans-disciplinary model for Game-Based Intervention design

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The design and development of game-based application aimed at serious purposes has to consider considerations from relevant disciplines. And it is a mammoth task to actually get every single experts as part of the design and development team. Based on the experience we had in the domain, myself and Samantha Clarke decided to synthesise the approach and considerations into a model that could be used as guidelines for ensuring some kind of rigour to game-based intervention methodology.

You can access the publication and official publisher’s blog post and other resources here:

And thanks to Samantha Clarke and Sarah Kernarghan-Andrews, we now have a playlist that further elaborates on the model:

 

 

 

 

The Be-attitudes of ‘Think Hybrid’

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My previous post emphasises on the importance of a more hybrid approach when it comes to using gamification as an experience design tool. I talked about my views on this at the last Gamification Europe conference and summarised lessons learnt as the Be-Attitudes of Thinking Hybrid. Please check out my slides here:

You can catch up on the talk here (think i had tooo much coffee), and correction – my colleague Mike Duncan is a Prof in Exercise Science, and not Game Science – that’s me- DOH!:

Check out more keynotes from the conference here: Playlist

Well done to Pete Jenkins, Vasilis and team!!!

Think Hybrid

Sylvester Arnab 1 Comment

I have been talking about hybrid solutions powered by games and play as inspirations a lot this year. Our projects at the lab have been looking at game-based approaches in different domains, working with various stakeholders (from primary school children through to the unemployed groups in Europe). As the university is pushing its online agenda for expanding our reach, the lab has been very keen in contextualising and storyboarding learning to consider a more hybrid approach, beyond the blended learning approach. Learning in a hybrid sense goes beyond the use of digital resources to support physical teaching and learning. Learning experience needs to merge the formal, informal and social realms, enabled by various digital and/or non-digital instruments fused together as one contextualised learning process.  “Blended learning focuses on the combination between offline and online learning, whereas hybrid learning is about finding the right mix for you out of all the possibilities in learning, no matter if they are offline or online.” (de Prez, aNewSpring, 2016).

think hybridReflecting on what we have done and are currently exploring, hybrid experiences should consider five key elements in order to be more holistic in their design, development and implementation:

  • People – Individual needs are key to forming our understanding of how a learning experience should be inclusive and diverse. How can we get people from different backgrounds to work together and to learn and support one another. How do we fuse the differences and exploit the similarities to ensure that the experience is more “hybrid” in the sense that group creativity and intelligence can be nurtured.
  • Process – What is the thought process behind the design of the experience. I’m an advocate for a more holistic approach that focuses on the fusing of learning needs, with possible activities, gameful/playful design being an integral elements, which may be enabled by different types of technology (analogue and/or digital). We have also developed an experimental development framework looking at transdisciplinarity to ensure that any game-based interventions are designed with rigour. This also links to the People element, where it is key to understand the different perspectives of not just the stakeholders but also experts and practitioners.
  • Space – We need to be more creative with “space”, where there is a need to maximise the impact of space in a learning experience. Digital and/or physical, informal and/or informal, a fuse of all the different spatial contexts, etc. Gamification as an experience design tool, enables us to transform any spaces and a combination of into a “playground”. Programmes such as GameChangers and CreativeCulture are turning ordinary spaces into co-creative platforms inspired by play and games. The people element and the transdisciplinary process play a key role here in facilitating a space for knowledge and skills to be applied. Such a hybrid approach allows learners not to be restricted by technology but to look at technology as enablers and perhaps inspirations. Creativity is key to learning.
  • Technology – We also need to be aware of how different technologies are advancing and what opportunities they provide. As inspirations for a hybrid ecosystem, technologies can be seen as contextualised enablers and enhancers. The world is getting more connected and pervasive, opening up opportunities for hybridity to be supersized locally and remotely. Beaconing for instance is exploring the use of context-aware, pervasive and gamified technologies for scaffolding/facilitating a learning path.
  • Content – Hybrid contents and resources should be more dynamic and not fixed, to enable them to be reused, repurposed and remixed to meet the needs of different learning objectives. Reusability and the ability to create and co-create new resources can be empowering. The entry barrier should be reduced and or removed to enable anyone to engage in content as a co-curator, co-creator, etc. A community of educators and learners curating contents and sharing them.

I will touch on these in my talk at the upcoming Gamification Europe 2017, where I will summarise the BE-attitudes of lessons learnt inspired by these elements. I will also share (during my slot as well as on twitter) a link to a simple Geo-location game powered by Beaconing (one of the authoring tools).

Experimenting #Gamification in the #Farming Sector CSA

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I have been very fortunate when it comes to engaging with the various sectors beyond my immediate research and development domain. Interdisciplinary collaboration really is the way forward towards impacting various societal needs. By collaborating with individuals from the different sectors, it is life-enriching as we are not experts of everything. Individual expertise coming together leads to collective creativity, intelligence, intervention and innovation.

Screenshot 2017-11-17 13.46.30Coventry University’s Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience (CAWR) has recently been awarded the EU Horizon 2020 funding for a 3-year Coordination and Support Action project, called Bond. Bond stands for Bringing Organisations and Network Development to Higher Levels in the Farming Sector in Europe.

…BOND’s general objective is to directly contribute to unleash, strengthen, and organise, the great potential for collective action and networking of individuals, groups and entities of farmers and land managers in selected countries across Europe, with a view to creating strong, dynamic and effective organizations that have a voice and a place in policy design. Through the benefits of working with others, extending interactions with multiple actors, the project will help foster human well-being, the management of landscapes, agricultural growth and a vigorous social capital throughout Europe.

Bond DoA 2017

When the proposal was still under development, I had many conversations with the coordinator Dr. Angela Hilmi on how playful and gameful approaches can be repurposed for developing participatory programmes that will facilitate the ‘bonding, bridging and linking’  of the relevant stakeholders in the farming sector. Being an advocate of a more holistic approach for implementing gamification, the role of gamification in the project is very much driven by the needs. Our main aim is to exploit our expertise in designing and implementing solutions that are inspired by games and play. Such solutions can be applied to different domains and in this case, they will be implemented and tested with the aim for facilitating community building, conversations and identification of challenges associated to the farming industry; specifically concerning the relevant stakeholders and the specific needs to be identified by the other tasks in the project. This work will link to one of the main objectives where non-digital gaming interface will be explored towards overcoming barriers between farmers and other actors, such as decision makers. In this task, we aim to design different playful and participatory programme/activities that will facilitate common understanding and to build constructive alliances. We will very much remix and repurpose activities designed and developed within the Disruptive Media Learning Lab’s GameChangers programme.

The kick-off meeting in Brussels (7-8 Nov) was pretty intense but exciting. We facilitated two playful sessions (designed in a couple of hours!) at the kick-off as part of the team building and the data collection activities. The sessions were well received as an introduction to how we could be inspired by play and games for designing participatory programmes.

I am looking forward to working with the consortium. Samantha Clarke will be joining me as the “creative producer and researcher” 🙂

Slides used at the kick-off:

#BeaconingEU and #C4Rs at #ECGBL17

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ECGBL is a mecca for game-based learning researchers, developers and practitioners. It is great to be here again and this time around with two papers based on work carried out in the H2020 Beaconing and Crowd4Roads projects.

Taxonomy of a gamified lesson path for STEM education: The Beaconing approach

 Aikaterini Bourazeri, Sylvester Arnab, Olivier Heidmann, Antonio Coelho and Luca Morini

 Abstract

21st Century learning focuses on different skills and expertise that learners should develop for a successful life and career, and these are usually organised into four main categories: ways of thinking (e.g. creativity, innovation, critical thinking, problem-solving); ways of working (e.g. communication and collaboration); tools for working (e.g. digital literacy) and living in the world (e.g. citizenship, social responsibility, awareness). Learning should be reshaped to better match these requirements and prepare learners for open societies where learning will be lifelong and based on critical-thinking, cultural awareness, flexibility and adaption to changes. This paper introduces a new approach developed under the scope of the Beaconing project, which aims to contextualise the teaching and learning process, connecting it with problem-based mechanics within STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics). The aim is to provide the missing connection between STEM subjects and real-world interactions and applications, and it is developed with inputs from teachers, researchers, educational experts and industry leaders. The pedagogical foundation is based on problem-based learning, in which active learning is in the centre and learners have to work with different tools and resources in order to solve problems (quests). Teachers facilitate, assess and author pervasive and gamified learning activities (missions). And these quests are gamified in order to provide non-linear game plots. This paper discusses the taxonomy for the Beaconing lesson path, which includes specific categories such as STEM competencies, learning objectives, pedagogical resources, rewards, narratives, game plots, location-based activities and game parameters. The lesson paths developed with the stakeholders will be populated with gamified learning activities such as mini-games, location-based mini-games, location-based activities and physical activities. The lesson paths will scaffold learners through self-directed and independent study, extending the learning experience beyond the classroom settings and complementing existing methods of teaching. The gamified lesson path taxonomy provides the backbone to the Beaconing platform and the associated components. This approach is adoptable and adaptable to various learning objectives.

 

A Gamified Approach for Facilitating a User-engagement Strategy for Public-Led Collective Awareness Platform for Road Sensing

Samantha Clarke, Sylvester Arnab, Mark Lewis, Luca Morini, Saverio Depriori, Alessandro Bogliolo and Lorenz Klopfenstein

Abstract

Collective awareness is a means by which communities can engage in collective action and crowdsourcing through citizen participation, leading to the accumulation of big data essential for informing decision making and for solving difficult problems.  However, engaging a huge number of the general public in a crowdsourcing initiative is a mammoth task. This paper explores the approach implemented by the Crowd4Roads (C4Rs) project, which aims at combining smart sensing, ride sharing and gamification applications to harness collective intelligence for providing open data towards boosting traffic conditions in Europe. Drawing on the theory of gameful/playful successes of using gamification as a motivating and behavioural change tool, Crowd4Roads adopts gamification as an innovative strategy for fostering user-engagement and promoting growth within the projects user acquisition and retention metrics. This paper presents the development approach of the C4Rs’ SmartRoadSense system and the design of the gamified layer that is employed to actively engage a large number of users for the pilot trials of the system. The paper provides a discussion and reflection on the development approach.