Gamification
Spanish and American Serious Games on Climate Change
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Tania Ouariachi, Laura Galván, Maria Dolores Olvera Lobo, José Gutiérrez-Pérez
What types of serious games tackling climate change are out there? What are the communicative trends? Do these types of games share similar quality levels across borders? This paper carries out a comparative quality assessment of games produced in two different countries. It looks at the United States (at the forefront of climate change games development) and Spain (experiencing its video game development “golden age,” ranking fourth in Europe and ninth in the world). For that purpose, we develop and put into practice a tool to assess the quality of thirty games (fifteen American and fifteen Spanish) based on the opinion of experts through the Delphi method. Criteria are categorized into identification, narrative, contents, gameplay, and didactics. Results reveal positive trends on how to communicate climate change, including make it local –to avoid psychological distance-, make it visual –to make climate change more real and memorable-, and make it connected – to provide a sense of agency. The total scores also reveal a higher quality level of American serious games on climate change. The paper will provide examples for best practices.
Knowledge about Gaming and University Student Teachers
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Alba Fiuza Fernández
Gamification means the use of game mechanics and not recreational environments applications, such as the school environment, in order to enhance motivation, concentration, effort, commitment, and other positive values common to all games. Gamification allows us to establish clear objectives to overcome. It also offers constant feedback, shows the progression of students, recognizes their effort, and guides them over the course of the teaching and learning process. This sample is composed of student teachers in the primary education specialty of Galicia, Spain. The scale obtains a reliability of 0.94 α. The index of Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) provides a value of 0.932 and Bartlett's test of sphericity (2 = 2739,793; gl = 351, p<.000), ensuring that the factor analysis is right and the model achieves a good fit. The students of primary education have not heard of the term gamification, but still consider its implementation feasible in the school environment.
Moving Towards the Integration of Unaccompanied Foreign Minors: Design and Development of a Mobile Application to Foster Educational and Social Intervention
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jose Javier Romero Díaz de la Guardia, Eva Olmedo Moreno
In this study, carried out within a research, development, and innovation (RDI) project financed by the Ministry of Education in Spain (EDU2017-88641-R), we explore the design and development process of an application for mobile devices, targeted to unaccompanied foreign minors, existing in the cross-border cities of North Africa and southern Europe.The purpose of the application is to shape the intervention process proposed by the project, and use a serious game dynamic based on challenges of overcoming, goals achievement and rewards, enriching the users personal learning environment, and contributing to a pleasant and playful way to improve their self-efficacy and school performance. It favours the inclusion of these groups in the societies where they are inserted, both from the educational and the laboral perspective. The development model is iterative and incremental, so that measurable results may be obtained in advance. Starting from an initial base version covering a subset of key intervention areas, new objectives are added to address all aspects of the educational intervention that is intended to be implemented. The contact with the target population from initial stages allows for immediate feedback that facilitates the addition of new functionalities or the adaptation of those already proposed.
