#DisruptiveBytes – EU-Funded Game-based projects

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In the spirit of collaboration amongst the different Eu-Funded projects, we organised a short lunchtime seminar to showcase the work that we have been carried out within the game-based research and innovation domain. The #DisruptiveBytes session is a regular lunctime meetup for staff across Coventry University and it is a great platform to demonstrate relevant outcomes that may inspire them to rethink teaching and learning.

The session touched on three projects that showcased reusable game components, new ways of developing gamified lesson planning and use of pervasive and location based technologies.

I presented the BEACONING project that stands for ‘Breaking Educational Barriers with Contextualised, Pervasive and Gameful Learning’ and focuses on ‘anytime anywhere’ learning by exploiting pervasive, context-aware and gamified techniques and technologies, framed under the Problem-Based Learning approach. You can see more updates on the project here.

 

It was a shame that Prof. Paul Hollins was not able to make it but his colleague Dr. Ying Liang was there to present the Rage Project, which stands for ‘Realising an Applied Gaming Eco-system’. The project aims to develop, transform and enrich advanced technologies from the leisure games industry into self-contained gaming assets that support game studios at developing applied games easier, faster and more cost-effectively. These assets will be available along with a large volume of high-quality knowledge resources through a self-sustainable Ecosystem, which is a social space that connects research, gaming industries, intermediaries, education providers, policy makers and end-users. The presentation discussed some initial findings of the project and how these might inform, shedding new light on the future development of Applied Games industry in Europe. 

Dr. Petros Lameras closed the seminar with a presentation on the MAGELLAN project, which has an overall vision to enhance the creativity of game designers by establishing a web platform for cost-effectively authoring, publishing, executing, and experiencing location based games. This unique integrated web-based infrastructure will be targeted at both skilled professional authors, but also at everyday authors without deep technical skills. MAGELLAN will be underpinned by scientific research into the principles and technologies of creative and location-based experiences in order to ensure that the platform is innovative while also extending our broader scientific understanding of creativity.

You can catch the presentations here:

Playing for Real – into a research paper

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The Playing for Real project ended September 2016 and it has produced guidelines for how gamification can inspire social change. The practice partners have since adopted and adapted the approach into their engagement with the local unemployed. See also my reflections here.

I have been planning to write a research paper to share some of the reflections and qualitative insights on the pilot that was carried out in Barcelona 2016. The paper is nearly completed and will be submitted to the Journal of Games and Culture.

Playing for Real: Piloting gamification in the community of unemployed adults towards fostering new mind-sets and practices

Abstract

This paper explores the potential of gamification for informing the design of a community-driven programme based on the Playing for Real project, which aims at nurturing positive attitudes and behaviours amongst unemployed adults. The levelling up programme co-designed with social actors within the project is described and the lessons learnt and reflections on the approach and outcomes of the project are also included to inform best practices, further improvements and future potential of the approach for further work and applications in other domains.

Keywords: Unemployment, capacity building, gamification, play, game-based learning

The paper will unpick the programme that was developed and pilot, and concluded with some recommendations of how they can be adopted and adapted. Qualitative feedback from the social actors are also documented to provide insights on the impact of the approach.

The project has explored and exploited the crossings between ‘play’, ‘games’ and ‘gamification’ in order to provide a more elastic approach for fostering gamified capacity building that is focusing on individuals’ potential to drive social change within their own situations and potentially impacting their local community. It is not about providing the solutions to their situations, but it is to expose them with a new approach for realising different potentials and outcomes they can tap into and produce.

The project has developed a Gamification taxonomy, template and programme that can be reused and repurposed for other application domain (learning, social change, behavioural studies, health etc.). The participatory approach for the co-designing of the programme exploited the power of community-driven development and practice.

Watch this space.

The first #Gamification conference in Finland #Gamifin2017

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It was a pleasure to be invited to speak at the first Gamification conference (GamiFIN 2017) in Finland. Finland has key players in games and gamification, such as Juho Hamari (the first Professor in Gamification). It is good to finally meet him in person. His systematic review of the literatures in the domain has been very useful and I have quoted it many times.

Juho presented his updated findings in his keynote at the conference (Day 2). The paper should be published soon. Looking forward to it.

Sebastian Deterding, a Reader at the University of York opened the conference with his keynote on theories and gamification, raising interesting insights and questions on how we need to conduct studies on the impact of gamification at a more granular level. What is actually working within the gamification process and system.

It was an interesting day filled with presentations on the various applications of gamification – both digital and non-digital. It was inspiring to hear about the different experiences and insights that came out of the experiments, pilots and actual implementation within real operational environments.

I closed day 1 with a keynote that emphasised on going back to basics and being inspired by the act of play and gameplay to inform the design of engaging experiences. Gamification is just a tool that can help us design such experiences.

Well done to the organisers, especially Jari Multisilta and Pauliina Tuomi of TUT. And Kristian Kiili, it was fab to see you again!

More tweet pics.

 

Game-based intervention design meets Design Thinking

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It was a great pleasure to run a one-day workshop with Daniel Meusburger with the University of Munich on 6th May 2017. A weekend well spent.

The workshop merged the transdisciplinary considerations for game-based intervention design and the design thinking methodology for empowering non-game designers to design their own playful and gameful strategies. The participants are involved in psychology and clinical research within the context of interventions for children with learning disorders. And this is part of their project for developing digital and online hub for supporting children and professionals, such as teachers, parents, support workers, etc. Picture1

This calls for a methodology with rigour that will ensure that the change objectives and measures intended for the proposed intervention programme are emphasised in the design process. The specific slide deck for the transdisciplinary approach is shared below. And you can read more here.

The group achieved first iteration of their design for interventions related to learning disorders and it is my hope that they will adopt and adapt the approach to develop programmes that will be implemented.

 

 

#BeaconingEU showcased at #Else2017

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We managed to meet our milestone for the end of April and presented what we have developed so far at the ELSE Conference 2017 as one of the 1/2 day workshops. It was pretty intense with quite a variety of prototypes to show- from the integrated gamified lesson path through to the location-based game authoring and the actual pervasive games that was designed specifically for the workshop.

Introduction slides for the workshop:

 

A quick introduction to our lesson path approach:

Some tweets from the day, also featuring the winners from the workshop on the day – the pervasive game, teacher feedback and student feedback. Well done to all and well done to the Romanian partner for making it a success.

Follow the project on Twitter and Facebook.

 

#BERA blog post on #GameScience methodology

Sylvester Arnab 1 Comment

I was recently invited to write a short blog post on Game Science for the British Educational Research Association (BERA) based on an article published on their SJR: Quartile 1 journal – British Journal of Educational Technology (BJET).

The use of game science in redesigning ordinary tasks is transforming everyday lives and most importantly injecting more fun in everyday contexts. The power of games to immerse and motivate, and the capabilities of games to foster and facilitate cognitive gain, awareness, and behavioural change have encouraged more games of this nature to be developed within a research context as well as to be deployed in real application setting.

The article describes a methodology for game science/game-based intervention development based on previous development experience that may inform future design and development for games and/or gamification with a purpose.

This piece of work, which has been published by the British Journal of Educational Technology (BJET) (see Arnab and Clarke 2017) emphasises on the need for best practices within a multi-disciplinary setting to be translated into a trans-disciplinary development methodology, which infuses knowledge from different disciplines and creates a unity of intellectual frameworks beyond the disciplinary perspectives. This infused methodological framework should act as a validated guide to inform a development process.

Read the blog post and/or the full article.

 

#BeaconingEU Meta-Game plot thickens

Sylvester Arnab 3 Comments

Had a productive Beaconing Virtual Workshop yesterday, where the partners demonstrated the current status of the various components that are also currently being integrated.

There are various components ranging from the game engine and authoring tool through to the analytics, PCG and context-aware components.

Slide1To break barriers of space and time in learning, there needs to be an overarching backbone that will bring these components together, and in our case it is the lesson paths that are being gamified and made more pervasive and context-aware. Each lesson path will be encapsulated by meta-game plots and narratives to provide a playful interface to the learning process, with key learning activities represented by a suite of mini-games and location-based activities. Please see the promo video in my previous post.

And the plot thickens with the need to support three different stakeholders i.e. learners, teachers and parents. The lesson path, analytics and dashboard teams are working hard to ensure that we take their needs and requirements into considerations.

Thanks to all the partners for the hard work to date and looking forward to the first integrated prototype by the end of the month.