Co-design is an ideal approach to design with users. It allows designers to create products, such as games, with their intended users and in their natural environment, e.g., children and their teachers in their school. Nowadays school contexts, however, pose their own requirements to co-design, which can affect its success. For instance, school contexts tend to be associated to boring rote by learners, who are used to interactive digital games. Gamification can then help in creating a positive engaging experience for school classes that co-design, as games do. This paper takes up such a view: it gamifies co-design contexts in order to positively engage school classes. To this end it presents two studies with gamified co-design in primary schools: heterogeneous teams codesigned prototypes by resolving missions as in a game, in the first short-term study; they did it in an even more gamified context, in the second long-term study. Results of both studies are encouraging for the approach. The paper also advances basic guidelines for tangibly gamifying co-design at school, grounded in the studies and literature.
Co-design is an ideal approach to design with mixed teams that include learners and teachers. However, in modern learning contexts, learning and engagement are both key goals, and that poses several challenges to co-design. This paper investigates such challenges after outlining co-design and situating it in current user experience design trends. Then the paper uses the challenges to derive requirements for co-design, and shows how to meet requirements, fostering engagement as well as learning, by blending co-design with gamification and cooperative learning. It ends by showcasing a study that uses the blended co-design approach, and by outlining how this led to novel challenges and work.
This paper presents a game design experience in primary schools, with children creating game design ideas and prototypes. Children were organized in cooperative groups. Game design tasks were organized following gamification principles, with ad-hoc gamified material. Cooperative learning and gamification served to elicit emotions and social inclusion. This paper measures them as follows. It operationalizes social inclusion with peer acceptance in three different social contexts, measured before and after the game design activity. It tracks achievement emotions experienced during game design at school. Then the paper examines the relationships between achievement emotions and peer acceptance. In this manner, it tackles an open problem in the literature concerning the links between emotions and social well-being in a game design experience. Path analyses indicate that, respectively for received choices and mutual friendships, positive emotions played a significant role in improving children's social relations, and negative emotions were associated with a significant deterioration of social relations, but only for the extra-school leisure context. The paper con-cludes assessing the study limits and results in relation to game design with and for children.Social inclusion can be conceptualized in terms of peer acceptance, one of the components of social competence as defined by Waters and Sroufe (1983). The other components are social engagement, social behavioral and psychological profiles, and peer acceptance. On the whole, social competence plays a key role for individuals' endeavors to organize behavioral, cognitive, and affective resources to achieve relevant goals within a group. Similarly, achievement emotions, which are focused on achievement activities or outcomes, are assumed to be central for outcomes related to performance in learning environments by theoretical approaches such as the control-value theory (Pekrun, 2006;Pekrun & Perry, 2014). In addition, control and value beliefs-as constructs highly relevant in participatory game design processes-would be critical in determining such emotions. However, so far research has paid scarce attention to the relationships between social competence and achievement emotions, and specifically on how peer acceptance can predict achievement emotions and how, in turn, it can be influenced in a game design context. . It allows children to rate an emotion on a 5-point Liker-type scale, with 5 faces corresponding to different levels of emotion intensity (1 = not at all and 5 = extremely). The considered emotions are: three positive activating emotions (enjoyment, hope, pride), two positive deactivating emotions (relief, relaxation), three negative activating emotions (anxiety, anger, shame), and two negative deactivating emotions (boredom, sadness). We calculated the aggregated positive and negative achievement emotions indicators by averaging together the responses related to the five missions for each emotion type (i.e., for the ten achievement emotions) and then summi...
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