From Idea to Reality: Extensive and Executable Modeling Language for Mobile Learning Games

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Students and schools are increasingly equipped with smartphones and tablets. These mobile devices can enhance teaching in many ways. Mobile Learning Games (MLGs) for example, have shown great potential for increasing student's motivation and improving the quality of situated learning. For the past few years, the research community has been working on authoring tools that allow teachers to create and distribute their own MLGs. The development of these authoring tools is challenging and time consuming and even more so if the objective is for these tools to actually be used in classrooms. The Design-Based Research (DBR) paradigm was precisely developed to address these central issues of Technology Enhanced Learning. It involves co-designing and testing with end-users from the beginning of the project. Although DBR increases the acceptance of new educational tools, it also adds several challenges, including the complexity of involving teachers and students in real-world situations and creating several versions of the tools that will be improved iteratively. In this paper, we aim at providing design principles and practical guidance on the way to develop such authoring tools, based on our experience. We conclude on lessons learned from this project and discuss some systematic issues we faced.

Section: Integration Of Domain-specific External Servicesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lessons Learned from the Development of a Mobile Learning Game Authoring Tool

Gicquel

Marfisi-Schottman

George

2019

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“…These authoring tools provide several game mechanics that use mobility for learning, but not collaboration. It is also hard to extract game mechanics from existing MOCOGAs because there are very few [7], [8] and their game scenarios are specific to their educational goals and context.…”

Section: Identifying Game Mechanics and Elements For Mocogasmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards an Authoring Tool to Help Teachers Create Mobile Collaborative Learning Games for Field Trips

Marfisi-Schottman

Lainé

Laforcade

et al. 2022

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Pedagogical activities that combine mobility, collaboration and game mechanics present significant advantages to attract students' attention and maintain their engagement in learning. Teachers naturally try to combine mobility and collaboration when they create field trips. Indeed, they identify several Points Of Interest that learners physically need to go to, thus requiring mobility, and they usually group students in teams to encourage collaboration, even if such collaboration is seldom attained. However, using the third elementgame mechanics -is harder for teachers because they are not familiar with game models and often not gamers themselves. In this article, we present the MOCOGA Model, a MObile COllaborative learning GAme Model that is designed to adapt to many types of field trips. This model also offers a nested design approach that guides teachers in enriching their field trips iteratively. This model is the first step towards the development of an authoring tool that will enable teachers to create their own smartphone applications.

“…2. Describing a conceptual model for botanical MLG scenarios: it offers high-level concepts, similar to the natural concepts used by teachers, and is rich enough to adapt to various types of MLGs [7]. Without going into detail, the model formalizes a MLG as a series of SituatedGameUnits each related to a POI (Point Of Interest), i.e.…”

Section: ) Scenarios Of Botanicalmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Because the first two points have already been detailed in previous publications ([6] and [7]), we detail here the third point: the botanical MLG meta-model.…”

Section: ) Scenarios Of Botanicalmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Design of a Component-Based Mobile Learning Game Authoring Tool

Gicquel

George²,

Laforcade³

et al. 2017

Self Cite

Mobile learning games (MLGs) have great potential in education, especially in fields requiring outdoors activities such as botany or cultural heritage education. However, the number of mobile learning games actually used for outdoor education remains very low. The absence of dedicated applications allowing to build MLGs, without technical expertise, is certainly one of the most important factors. To overcome this limitation, we propose a design method for MLG authoring tools, based on reusable components. We describe in this paper the design and first results of Moggle-Designer, a full-web MLG authoring tool requiring no technical expertise. We detail how a model-based approach, combined with component-oriented programming, adequately allow the representation and manipulation of didactic expert knowledge. Finally, we present Moggle-Player, an application for running the designed MLGs on any mobile browser. Moggle-Designer was used to design several mobile games that have been tested during a pilot study in a botanical park.