BEACONING
Breaking Educational Barriers with Contextualised, Pervasive and Gameful Learning Computer Science and Engineering
Description
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. The Beaconing project aimed to contextualise the teaching and learning process, connecting it with problem-based mechanics within STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics).
The aim was to provide the missing connection between STEM subjects and real-world interactions and applications, and it was developed with inputs from teachers, researchers, educational experts and industry leaders. The pedagogical foundation was 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 were gamified in order to provide non-linear game plots.
The goal of the project was to create a platform of pervasive games, that can transmit educational content in the most opportune moments to students, based on the philosophy Anytime, anyplace. Pervasive games extend the gaming world to the surrounding environment, which can be a classroom, the student home or the city where he lives in. It developed a platform to automatically generate mobile applications with pervasive games, according to the description made by the teachers themselves, who launch challenges and questions to the students, and that integrates itself with the instruments and educational services that exist in the organizations participating in the project. To test BEACONING, in 2017, large scale systems, in Greece, Turkey, France, Israel and Romania, were implemented, each one involving hundreds of students and professionals in Europe, assuring both an exploration and a business plan to adopt this platform.
Scientific Advances
The BEACONING project was concluded in April 2019 and achieved the following results:
• Integrated BEACONING ecosystem: a cloud-based modular platform that supports the delivery of integrated learning. This platform provides a set of core services and tools that integrate the whole community in a gamified workflow. Game designers create games to foster the learning activities, organized by educators, that make them available to teachers to deploy to the students.
• Gamified Lesson Path (GLP): the core of the BEACONING Project and experience. The GLP [Bourazeri et al.] embeds learning in the daily life of the students, while providing deep engagement through their Game Plots overlaid over the pedagogical content. The game plot is the game narrative that drives the student in the learning activity. The game plot can include adventures and/or location-based narratives. On top of this game plot, the teachers integrate the gamified learning activities (missions) and the specific challenges (problems) to solve (quests), including the analytics that provide feedback to the teacher about the students' performance.
• BEACONING Platform GUI: graphical user interfaces (GUIs) used in the BEACONING Platform form the front-end user experience (UX) for important stakeholders such as the Teacher and the Students. Teachers can select and edit the GLP that they find more useful for their classes and deploy them at the most appropriate time. Through a dashboard, the teachers can monitor the progression of the students' activities and their performance, being able to adapt the GLP for each student according to their needs. The students have their dashboard that allows them to be aware of the missing activities and get feedback on their progress and performance.
• Authoring tool: The authoring tool (Cardoso et al., 2020) is also a core component as it allows the creation and editing of the GLP, integrating the pedagogical contents with the game plots. So, its architecture integrates most of the BEACONING components, and the GUI is intuitive and based on a visual paradigm in order for a teacher to understand how the game plot will drive the educational activities. The tool sets up the mini-games (quests) that drive the educational content (missions) and assigns them to the events of the game plot. Finally, it submits the GLP to the core services, in order to make it available for the teachers to deploy it to the students.
• Game plot editor: Game plots can be created by game companies using this tool, making new game plots available for instructional design of GLP. Although a more specific tool, this game plot editor is meant for anyone with knowledge on game design to implement the game mechanics and level design without any knowledge of programming.
• Learning Analytics: The BEACONING ecosystem provides educational activities as GLP instances. These activities generate a comprehensive set of analytics that are available for teachers to monitor students' performance (Martinez-Ortiz et al., 2019). The analytics are defined on the authoring tool at the time of the learning design. This enables the teacher to get analytics already integrated in the GLP as they deploy it.
Results
The main results can be listed as:
- The Inven!RA Architecture - an INESC TEC complete solution for immersive learning platforms: Coelho, A., Rodrigues, R., Nóbrega, R., Jacob, J., Morgado, L., Cardoso, P., van Zeller, M., Santos, L., Sousa, A. A. (2020). Serious Pervasive Games, Frontiers in Computer Science, vol. 2, 30 pages. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomp.2020.00030
- Projects with Industry: VRTrainingIndustry,
- PhD Thesis:
• Liliana Andreia da Rocha Santos, The Use of Pervasive Serious Games in the Scientific Dissemination of Natural Heritage, Programa Doutoral em Media Digitais, UP, 2023.
• Maria Van Zeller, Play the Museum: A framework for designing location-based games with augmented reality for museological spaces, Programa Doutoral em Media Digitais, UP, 2022.
• Ricardo Baptista, Jogos Sérios para Treino e Certificação de Competências, Programa Doutoral em Media Digitais, UP, 2017.
The aim was to provide the missing connection between STEM subjects and real-world interactions and applications, and it was developed with inputs from teachers, researchers, educational experts and industry leaders. The pedagogical foundation was 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 were gamified in order to provide non-linear game plots.
The goal of the project was to create a platform of pervasive games, that can transmit educational content in the most opportune moments to students, based on the philosophy Anytime, anyplace. Pervasive games extend the gaming world to the surrounding environment, which can be a classroom, the student home or the city where he lives in. It developed a platform to automatically generate mobile applications with pervasive games, according to the description made by the teachers themselves, who launch challenges and questions to the students, and that integrates itself with the instruments and educational services that exist in the organizations participating in the project. To test BEACONING, in 2017, large scale systems, in Greece, Turkey, France, Israel and Romania, were implemented, each one involving hundreds of students and professionals in Europe, assuring both an exploration and a business plan to adopt this platform.
Scientific Advances
The BEACONING project was concluded in April 2019 and achieved the following results:
• Integrated BEACONING ecosystem: a cloud-based modular platform that supports the delivery of integrated learning. This platform provides a set of core services and tools that integrate the whole community in a gamified workflow. Game designers create games to foster the learning activities, organized by educators, that make them available to teachers to deploy to the students.
• Gamified Lesson Path (GLP): the core of the BEACONING Project and experience. The GLP [Bourazeri et al.] embeds learning in the daily life of the students, while providing deep engagement through their Game Plots overlaid over the pedagogical content. The game plot is the game narrative that drives the student in the learning activity. The game plot can include adventures and/or location-based narratives. On top of this game plot, the teachers integrate the gamified learning activities (missions) and the specific challenges (problems) to solve (quests), including the analytics that provide feedback to the teacher about the students' performance.
• BEACONING Platform GUI: graphical user interfaces (GUIs) used in the BEACONING Platform form the front-end user experience (UX) for important stakeholders such as the Teacher and the Students. Teachers can select and edit the GLP that they find more useful for their classes and deploy them at the most appropriate time. Through a dashboard, the teachers can monitor the progression of the students' activities and their performance, being able to adapt the GLP for each student according to their needs. The students have their dashboard that allows them to be aware of the missing activities and get feedback on their progress and performance.
• Authoring tool: The authoring tool (Cardoso et al., 2020) is also a core component as it allows the creation and editing of the GLP, integrating the pedagogical contents with the game plots. So, its architecture integrates most of the BEACONING components, and the GUI is intuitive and based on a visual paradigm in order for a teacher to understand how the game plot will drive the educational activities. The tool sets up the mini-games (quests) that drive the educational content (missions) and assigns them to the events of the game plot. Finally, it submits the GLP to the core services, in order to make it available for the teachers to deploy it to the students.
• Game plot editor: Game plots can be created by game companies using this tool, making new game plots available for instructional design of GLP. Although a more specific tool, this game plot editor is meant for anyone with knowledge on game design to implement the game mechanics and level design without any knowledge of programming.
• Learning Analytics: The BEACONING ecosystem provides educational activities as GLP instances. These activities generate a comprehensive set of analytics that are available for teachers to monitor students' performance (Martinez-Ortiz et al., 2019). The analytics are defined on the authoring tool at the time of the learning design. This enables the teacher to get analytics already integrated in the GLP as they deploy it.
Results
The main results can be listed as:
- The Inven!RA Architecture - an INESC TEC complete solution for immersive learning platforms: Coelho, A., Rodrigues, R., Nóbrega, R., Jacob, J., Morgado, L., Cardoso, P., van Zeller, M., Santos, L., Sousa, A. A. (2020). Serious Pervasive Games, Frontiers in Computer Science, vol. 2, 30 pages. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomp.2020.00030
- Projects with Industry: VRTrainingIndustry,
- PhD Thesis:
• Liliana Andreia da Rocha Santos, The Use of Pervasive Serious Games in the Scientific Dissemination of Natural Heritage, Programa Doutoral em Media Digitais, UP, 2023.
• Maria Van Zeller, Play the Museum: A framework for designing location-based games with augmented reality for museological spaces, Programa Doutoral em Media Digitais, UP, 2022.
• Ricardo Baptista, Jogos Sérios para Treino e Certificação de Competências, Programa Doutoral em Media Digitais, UP, 2017.