Serious applications of technology in games and health

Por Claudia Zúñiga, Fabian Castillo, Anita Portilla y 9 más

Este volumen, busca principalmente motivar y visualizar los trabajos de investigadores jóvenes. Es resultado de la conferencia Edutainment 2019, la treceava conferencia internacional en e-learning y juegos y, el Workshop on Computing and Technology in Health realizado en paralelo y como evento complementario a Edutainment.

This volume seeks mainly to motivate and visualize the works of young researchers. It is the result of the Edutainment 2019 conference, the thirteenth international conference in e-learning and games and, the Workshop on Computing and Technology in Health held in parallel and as a complementary event to Edutainment.

• Idioma: Español
• Editorial: Sello Editorial Javeriano
• Fecha de lanzamiento: 12 ene 2019
• ISBN: 9789585119642

Vista previa del libro

Labs.

1. Prologue

Wikipedia (2020, par. 1), defines edutainment or educational entertainment as media designed to educate through entertainment, and states that the interest to do this has been present for hundreds of years. One example is the Poor Richard’s Almanack which demonstrated early implementation of edutainment; here, Benjamin Franklin combined entertaining and educational content into and instructional booklet of rules of conduct for colonists using puzzles. In this way, Figure 1 shows edutainment as part of a continuum: the continuum and overlaps between the world of development and entertainment; multiple sectors lie in between, such as SBCC (Social and Behavior Change Communications), C4D (Communication for Development), Entertainment-Education and Social Impact Entertainment (Deml, 2018, par. 1), with applications range from TV (e.g. Sesame Street) to games, theme parks (e.g. Epcot Centre) and museums.

Figure 1.

Impact-Entertainment continuum

Source: (Deml, 2018).

Today, technology has pervaded all fields of human knowledge and activity, and edutainment is not an exception. Fields such as virtual and augmented reality, gamification, serious games, graphics, imaging, game rendering, animation, computer vision and e-learning are now considered important in education. Therefore, edutainment was born keeping in mind the need of collaborative research and practice required by innovative educational entertaining applications; it is important to learn to what extent technology and entertainment are useful for learning. That is why Edutainment 2019, the 13th International Conference on E-Learning and Games, was a place where researchers from all over the world and particularly from Latin America, exchanged experiences in the emerging field which combines education and entertainment. As previous versions which took place in China, Canada, Germany, Australia, UK, Edutainment 2019 covered all aspects of pedagogical principles, designs, and technological issues for education, research, and entertainment.

Professor Zhigeng Pan

Founder, Chair of Steering Committee of Edutainment Conferences

References

Wikipedia (16 June 2020). Educational entertainment. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_entertainment

Deml, T. (19 April 2018). File:Development-Entertainment Continuum.png. Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Development-Entertainment_Continuum.png

2. Invited Keynote paper

While planning Edutainment 2019 and CoTH, the organizing committee were aware of the importance of making Cali the world centre of serious games and health technologies for a few days. The event reunited around 100 participants from 10 countries with several profiles: we had undergraduate and graduate students, a group of students from a public high school (for whom we designed two training sessions), and excellent authors, artists, entrepreneurs, and professors from Latin America, North America, Asia and Europe; also, we had the local press and one International Game Developers Association (IGDA) representative. Although there were a lot of chances for networking, we wanted to show the world what we were able to do in Colombia. For that reason, we not only invited five keynotes from overseas to bring knowledge from the world to Colombia, but also four keynotes from Colombia so people from all over the world could take Colombian knowledge back home. In this section, one Colombian author discusses his experiences with Minecraft as an educational tool.

Introduction and justification to virtual immersive learning environments supported by the MinecraftEdu platform in Piloto University of Colombia

Fernando Alonso Gómez Carrillo¹

Universidad Piloto de Colombia

Abstract:

The current document presents, in a contextualized manner, the use of digital games in learning environments and the difficulties that many educational institutions have faced when trying to adapt this kind of tools. In this case, it’s presented a new concept for learning environments that emerged with the Minecraft platform: the Voxel classroom and its application as immersive learning environment. The document justifies the use of these tools in the Piloto University in Colombia, emphasizing their open structure and advantages as the Game of life or Virtual lego and pointing its flexibility and adaptability for different kind of subjects or courses. The use of Minecraft in many real-world architectural projects is illustrated, for instance Block by Block by United Nations and the course Design I belonging to the Building Architecture program of Piloto University. At the end, an inventory of basic game resources is presented in addition to a general evaluation of partial results.

Keywords: Minecraft, immersive learning, games, gamification, virtual worlds, courses.

Introduction

Since it was created, the Virtual Education Department of the Universidad Piloto de Colombia develops a training process to teachers that seeks to facilitate the adoption and application of information and communication technologies for online learning, relying mainly on learning platforms (LMS) and synchronous tools (videoconferencing). However, as a result of the recent appearance of new educational technologies, this support unit presents to the institution the resources to develop a new line of teacher training in immersive educational environments supported by the Minecraft platform, understanding that an immersive virtual learning environment is a 3D digital scenario, with a structure and organization intentionally defined for the achievement of learning purposes organized into didactic units or components of a course, contributing to the development of the learning goals proposed by an educational program (Gómez, 2012). This new line of training, will make it easier for teachers to adopt this immersive learning platform and incorporate it into their subjects, but first doing a reflective exercise to justify and contextualize its use. This is how the Universidad Piloto, becomes one of the first institutions in Latin America that explores learning in immersive platforms as a sustainable alternative to support learning-teaching processes in various areas of knowledge.

The complexity of using digital games in an educational environment

One of the main goals of education must be to enlarge the windows through which we appreciate the world.

Arnold H. Glasow

Improving teaching and making it a pleasant experience for the student is a common requirement for teachers. Then, it´s not rare to find in every education or e-learning congress a mention to game-based learning, virtual simulators and innovative tools as means to achieve this much desired goal. As Piaget (Bringuier, 1980) would say: Childhood is the creative phase par excellence... (p.115), and it seems that many modern teachers and students yearn to recover the child that exists in each person and articulate it with teaching-learning processes. In this perspective, it can be said that many of the methodological related questions that educators have, can be answered with the application of immersive and playful tools with a pedagogical sense. Some of these questions are the following:

•How to make learning truly meaningful and centered on the learner?

•How can we simulate complex real-life environments without boring or demotivating the student who is facing them?

•How to facilitate flexibility, collaborative work and interdisciplinarity?

•How can we mediate our traditional pedagogical strategies in a more effective, enjoyable and attractive way?

•How to keep students motivated?

However, reaching a consistent and viable application of these tools within an educational institution is a complex task. Following the production of playful environments and simulators with a pedagogical sense, to date there are multiple investigations showing their benefits and contributions to learning, but despite having many reasons to use them the institutions have not found an adequate formula to achieve the continuity and transcendence of these resources in the curriculum of their careers or programs. Thus, a large part of the experiences with immersive environments and videogames with a pedagogical sense have been localized and somehow limited to contexts of certain topics and teachers, and do not succeed in impacting the development of academic programs on a large scale.

In addition, forming teams of specialists for the production of playful virtual environments or virtual simulators is costly and requires times that the institution and teachers are often unwilling to sacrifice; the situation worsens because, in general, these resources are relegated to the level of support activities for courses, being difficult to adapt them to other contexts and uses. In other words, it’s not easy to justify large investments in the development of educational games or immersive tools within many educational institutions, a situation aggravated by the era of the internet, where free resources are always