Achievement Emotions and Peer Acceptance Get Together in Game Design at School

Abstract

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...

A Meta-Analysis of Selected Studies on the Effectiveness of Gamification Method for Children

“…-Achievement Emotions and Peer Acceptance Get Together in Game Design at School (Brondino et al, 2014).…”

Mapping Gamification Mechanisms to User Experience Factors for Designing User Interfaces

“…This framework improved the engagement of the participants in the recycling process by rewarded for the amount they recycle (González-Briones et al, 2018). Brondino et al (2014) presented a research work in the education field in the context of children in primary school. Their goal was to encourage the children to create paper game design ideas and prototypes based on gamification principles to track their emotions experienced during game design at school time (Brondino et al, 2014).…”

“…Brondino et al (2014) presented a research work in the education field in the context of children in primary school. Their goal was to encourage the children to create paper game design ideas and prototypes based on gamification principles to track their emotions experienced during game design at school time (Brondino et al, 2014). The authors measured the children emotions in different social context before and after the game design activity (Brondino et al, 2014).…”

“…Their goal was to encourage the children to create paper game design ideas and prototypes based on gamification principles to track their emotions experienced during game design at school time (Brondino et al, 2014). The authors measured the children emotions in different social context before and after the game design activity (Brondino et al, 2014). The results show that positive emotions play an essential role in improving the social relations of children, while negative emotions associated with a significant deterioration in social relations in the context of out-ofschool recreation (Brondino et al, 2014).…”

“…The authors measured the children emotions in different social context before and after the game design activity (Brondino et al, 2014). The results show that positive emotions play an essential role in improving the social relations of children, while negative emotions associated with a significant deterioration in social relations in the context of out-ofschool recreation (Brondino et al, 2014).…”