The development
of immersive digital educational games (DEG) is a dawning
and highly promising, but also highly challenging, technology.
Computer games offer engaging and inspiring virtual environments
within which entirely new, motivating, and meaningful learning
experiences and contexts can be realized. Their simulative
characteristics strongly contribute to the paradigm of knowledge
construction; moreover, multiplayer games serve the ideas
of collaborative learning. DEGs basically aim at using the
time spent on playing for educational purposes while retaining
the recreational value of gaming. Furthermore, such games
aim at facilitating learning by providing inspiring learning
experiences in an appealing and meaningful learning context.
80Days has the ambitious mission to significantly improve
the scientific and technological state-of-the-art of digital
games for educational purposes, as well as to pave the way
for educational games to successfully enter the computer game
and educational markets. This mission shall be accomplished
by addressing two primary interrelated challenges:
Virtual game environments, and
the degree of freedom they facilitate, challenge existing
approaches to adaptive educational technologies. In contrast
to traditional approaches to technology-enhanced learning,
individualization of learning experiences as well as the adaptation
to individual learners with individual aims, needs, abilities,
and prerequisites requires an in-depth understanding of the
learners and their behaviour within a DEG. While traditional
approaches to intelligent and adaptive educational technologies
primarily focus on knowledge and learning progress, DEGs constrain
the consideration of aspects such as individual preferences
(in terms of visual styles or gaming genre), individual motivation,
collaboration, or (problem solving) behaviour within the virtual
environment. As a consequence, the project will significantly
extend and integrate models of adaptive personalised learning
with those of adaptive interactive storytelling, and tailor
them to the requirements of digital educational games. First
ideas pursuing this direction come, for example, from Albert,
Pivec, Spörk-Fasching, and Maurer (2003).
On the other hand, a weak spot
of utilizing digital games for educational purposes - especially
those that address older children who are used to the enormous
quality and appeal of commercial computer games - is the high
level of costs for developing high-quality immersive DEGs.
These costs must be justified by educational efficacy, by
an appropriate balance between gaming and learning, and -
most importantly - by the market for specific educational
game genres. 80Days will establish a technical as well as
psycho-pedagogical framework that enables reducing development
costs and shortening development lifecycles. Essentially,
this shall be accomplished by providing technologies for adaptive
interventions, interactive and adaptive storytelling and especially
by merging rich and appealing virtual game environments with
existing (learning) resources, enabling the creation of multiple
games or game scenarios.
As a logical consequence, 80Days
addresses two major objectives, that is, (a) advancing frameworks
of non-invasive personalization/adaptation on the macro as
well as the micro levels (in terms of theory and technology)
and (b) establishing a methodology for reducing the costs
of developing DEGs. More detailed, the specific goals are
to establish a theoretical and technological framework that
allows to
- interpret and assess the learners knowledge/learning
progress within the game environment in a non-invasive way,
- interpret and assess the learner’s
motivational/emotional state within the game environment
in a non-invasive way,
- provide non-invasive educational interventions
on the micro level by personalized guidance or hinting
- provide educational interventions on the
macro level by sequencing of learning situations and activities
and by adapting the storyline,
- integrate existing (learning) resources into
DEGs,
- develop different (game) scenarios on the
basis of one pool of learning and gaming resources, and
- evaluating DEGs and their features in a
scientifically sound way.
The interdisciplinary
approach to both objectives will deliver an innovative and,
most importantly, scientifically sound methodological framework
for developing and utilizing immersive digital games for educational
purposes. Moreover, interdisciplinary research and development,
which can be viewed as smoothly meshing gearwheels, will provide
a significant advance in understanding active human learning
processes and, consequently, an important evolution of adaptive
educational technology.The accomplishment of these goals will
result in the provision of the reference model for immersive
DEGs and also for adaptive educational technology in general.
This in turn will increase the acceptance of DEGs in educational
settings and push the commercialization of competitive DEGs.
Indicators of 80Days’ success are seen in
- the exploitation of results in terms of scientific impact
(e.g., the number of high-quality publications),
- general impact (e.g., sales figures of the envisaged
methodology guide book), and
- the extent of commercial descendents.
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