Issues of Learning Games: From Virtual to Real
Author: Carron, Thibault
Date: 2013-10-00
Type: Speeches/Meeting Papers
Subjects: Educational Games,Simulated Environment,Technology Uses in Education,Teaching Methods,Computer Games,College Students,Cooperation,Information Management,Foreign Countries,Business,Qualitative Research,Statistical Analysis,Student Attitudes

Our research work deals with the development of new learning environments, and we are particularly interested in studying the different aspects linked to users' collaboration in these environments. We believe that Game-based Learning can significantly enhance learning. That is why we have developed learning environments grounded on graphical representations of a course. These environments allow us to set up experiments with students in our university. The emergence of online multiplayer games led us to apply the metaphor of exploring a virtual 3D world, where each student embarks on a quest in order to collect knowledge related to a learning activity. In the environment, each part of the world represents a place, sometimes a collaborative place, where students are supposed to acquire a particular concept. Learning objects, artefacts or collaborative tools may be present in each location and a correct answer to a specific exercise gives a key to the students, allowing them to access other activities. Although the students appreciate this approach, there is a lack of assessment of know-how-type skills, especially for the teacher. Indeed, certain domains present the particularity of exhibiting both theoretical knowledge and practical know-how (operations in manufacturing or medicine, for example). For such contexts, the current Learning Games are not efficient concerning this second point: a unique and full digitalisation of these objects alone is not sufficient to guarantee both effective learning and assessment of the techniques. We consider this as a gamification problem. As a matter of fact, in industrial domains, the learning processes are often based on the use of certain objects that are difficult to include in a learning game. Moreover, although some games are collaborative, an effective collaborative activity is more effective in a real context. Our objective is then to facilitate the transfer by integrating a new object present both in the game and in the classroom. In this paper, we focus on the way to integrate the use of real objects into the learning game environments. In our approach, we develop a digital copy of the object that will help to exhibit the specific know-how that must be evaluated. It is then easier during the gamification process to include in the learning scenario certain parts that are relevant to the use of such an object and that are achieved in a real context. First, we describe briefly the &quot;Learning Adventure&quot; environment: a generic game-based platform. Then, we explain what the new issues of such contexts are, and how we are able to setup a collaborative learning session with both virtual and real objects. The third part concerns the application to a concrete problem: to identify and manage NonConformities thanks to a Product Lifecycle Management tool. A real experiment has thus been carried out at our university in the PLM domain with the help of a multi-touch tabletop, to validate the feasibility of the approach and illustrate our point. [For the full proceedings, see ED562107.]