2012 12th IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies
Utilizing virtual worlds for game based learning:
Grafica, a 3D educational game in Second Life
Theodouli Terzidou, Thrasyvoulos Tsiatsos, Antonia Dae, Odysseas Samaras, Apostolia Chasanidou
Department of Informatics
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
Thessaloniki, Greece
{lterz, tsiatsos, antai, osamaras, achasani}@csd.auth.gr
More particularly, the game was designed to support the
course "Multimedia Systems" in a Department of
Informatics, based on an Extended Design and Evaluation
framework for 3D Collaborative Virtual Games [1]. The
game scenario is about a collaborative treasure hunt game.
According to this scenario groups of students are playing by
navigating, interacting, experimenting, collaborating and
learning. The game takes place in a properly designed and
equipped multi-user 3D educational virtual space. There the
students should answer questions and try to earn points in
order to help their group to win the game.
In order to investigate the effectiveness of the 3D
educational game, this paper addresses the following
research questions:
• RQ1: Can virtual worlds be utilized by the game
based learning to improve the effectiveness of the
knowledge acquisition?
• RQ2: What feelings created the experience of 3D
virtual environments to the students during their
participation in such a game learning activity?
• RQ3: Did the virtual game activity motivate the
participated students to study better the course
material?
• RQ4: Do the students recommend the systematically
existence of such activities in education?
This article is structured as follows: The next section
presents the theoretical framework for game learning. The
third section presents the GrAFiCA game scenario. The
fourth section presents the implementation. The fifth section
presents the evaluation process and results. The final section
indicates some concluding remarks along with our vision for
next steps.
Abstract—This paper presents the design, implementation and
evaluation of a three dimensional collaborative knowledge
game, called "GrAFiCA", that utilizes the Second Life
collaborative virtual environment. The presented study is part
of a larger research project focusing on designing and
evaluating game based learning in virtual worlds. Our aim is to
investigate the effectiveness of three dimensional game-based
learning techniques through a detailed collaborative game
scenario, at the level of tertiary education.
Keywords-3D Game Based Learning; Grafica immersive
game; immersive learning; educational game; serious games;
learning in virtual worlds
I.
INTRODUCTION
Both popularity of digital games and continuing advances
in computer science and technology, constitute a challenge
for the educational researchers to provide and to produce
knowledge by exploiting both these aspects in an efficient
and effective manner. We believe that instructional designers
can learn and adopt from commercial "fun" Massively
Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) techniques, to be
adapted to learners needs in order to improve teaching and
learning, while fostering students’ engagement.
Educational game designers face the challenge to move
from one person games to multiplayer and collaborative
games and from two-dimensional (2D) to three-dimensional
(3D) environments. Moreover learning and game based
learning is moving from simple "task execution" to active
learning and experiential learning, towards a more
constructivist learning model. Immersive environments seem
to have the necessary and suitable characteristics to invoke
all these new needs of the instructional designers. Both
Virtual Learning Environments (VLE) and Game Based
Learning (GBL) seem to have gained an advantage in
modern learning approaches.
Although much research has been conducted towards
game based learning for school and pre-school ages, there is
little research specifically on tertiary education and even less
in highly interactive virtual environments. At this direction,
our 3D educational game aims to propose a novel way to put
into practice, existing game based learning theories in a
modern and technologically advanced framework, utilizing
online virtual environments as a system platform.
978-0-7695-4702-2/12 $26.00 © 2012 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/ICALT.2012.55
II.
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
This section presents a theoretical research study about
game-based learning, their utilization in the educational
process and the applicability of 3D virtual worlds as platform
for game-based collaborative learning.
A. Utilizing games as learning tool
A theoretical investigation about the term of Game Based
Learning can lead to several similar used definitions that
involve the same concept of learning while playing. Thus,
GBL is also termed as "Serious Games", "Digital Game
Learning" (DGL), "Digital Game Based Learning",
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III.
"Educational
Games"
and
"Immersive
Learning
Simulations". We define Game Based Learning as the
educational process, which uses game experiences as a tool
to learn [1]. According to [2], serious game is a game, in
which, education (in its various forms) is the primary goal,
rather than entertainment, while [3] defines serious games as
interactive experiences that are easy and fun to engage while
building awareness.
According to [4], challenge, fantasy, and curiosity
consists the major kinds of motivation; early in 2001, [5]
argues that motivation, through the promise of Digital Game
Based Learning, can be found for learning the subjects and
content that are the most difficult to teach or train and
identifies six characteristics that make a game engage: rules,
goals and objectives, outcomes and feedback, conflictcompetition-challenge-opposition,
interaction,
and
representation or story [5].
Furthermore, collaborative learning methods tend to
encourage construction of knowledge, deeper understanding
and greater skill development through their ability to engage
students dynamically in the learning process ([6], [7]) and
game-like activities can foster students’ deep learning [8]. In
addition, psychology researchers identify the major strength
of digital games in education at the high level of intrinsic
motivation to play and to proceed in the game and, thus, to
learn [9].
BRIEF PRESENTATION OF THE GRAFICA GAME
In order to evaluate the utilization of virtual worlds for
game based learning we have implemented such a game
called GrAFiCA. The design and the scenario of this game
has been presented at [1]. This paper presents a brief
overview of this game in order to help the reader to
understand the evaluation results.
The name of the game comes out from the following
acronym: Grouping and selecting Attire, Find, Collaborate
and Answer, which also indicate the phases of the game.
The main aim of engaging the game in the educational
process is to increase student motivation for learning,
develop their collaboration skills and guide them in a
pleasant manner to construct knowledge and achieve better
learning by augmenting the traditional learning process with
an appropriately designed 3D collaborative virtual
educational game [12].
A. The Game Scenario
The game starts at the Game Lobby, where the tutor
gives the start signal and s/he announces the exact game
duration. The players (i.e. students) form groups. Each group
corresponds to a particular avatar attire color to be easily
differentiated from other groups and to be supported in the
internal group interactions during the game [1]. Then, they
are starting to search for the hidden questions. The more
correct answers one group give, the closer is to the victory.
The players operate under specific game rules and under
time pressure. The questions are in form of multiple choice,
based on the syllabus of the undergraduate course of the
sixth semester of our Informatics Department, "Multimedia
Systems" and they are randomly hidden in virtual objects
that decorate the thematic buildings in the game space.
B. Serious Games & 3D Virtual World
3D virtual worlds seem to have the potential to support
Game-based learning it both in a collaborative and an
exploratory learning way. 3D technology, more than ever, is
promising for the expansion of GBL in a synthetic
interactive and collaborative virtual environment, which
could exploit and validate the constructivist learning theories
with less technological limitations. A virtual learning
environment can distribute knowledge and cognition among
various artefacts (such as educational tools and virtual
objects), among students, for example when they collaborate
to solve a problem, or to perform an experiment [10].
Virtual 3D immersive worlds provide students a
constructivist environment, where they can play, act,
communicate, collaborate through their human-looking
representations, named avatars. Capin et al. [11] define
avatar as a graphical representation of a real person in a
collaborative virtual environment, including its behavior.
In addition, the usage of non-verbal communication
(NVC) features, provided by 3D virtual environments
through the avatars, can foster the users' collaboration
interactions [12]. Similarly, [13], early in 1992, argues that,
simulation instructional approaches enhance students' ability
to apply abstract knowledge by situating education in
authentic, virtual contexts similar to the environments in
which learners' skills will be used [13].
Moreover, [14] mentions that a wide range of participants
are attracted to cooperative virtual environments due to the
fact that they gain something valuable by collaborating
together.
Figure 1. Game phases
The main goal of the GrAFiCA game is to collect as
many points as possible during a specific time period by
answering knowledge questions. The winner of the game is
the group with the highest score. Groups score by answering
questions, while questions have to be first discovered in a
virtual world environment. A more detailed game flow is
depicted in Fig.1 and its phases are the following:
• Grouping and selecting Attire: Participants-players
form groups and enter the virtual environment.
Players start their exploration from the starting point
called "Game Lobby", where they will be provided
with clothes for their avatars. Each group
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•
•
corresponds to a particular avatar attire color to be
easily differentiated from other groups and to be
supported in the internal group interactions during
the game (Tsiatsos and Terzidou, 2010).
Find (Question Hunting): The players navigate
through the virtual game space and start their
question discovery.
Collaborate and Answer (Collect points and
awards): At this phase the students of each group
define a strategy to collaborate, answer questions
and collect awards. Four different chat-groups were
created in Second Life, one for each student group.
The steps followed for the development of the game are
the following:
• Creation of thematic Buildings
• Assignment of hidden questions to virtual objects
and programming them
• Development of the game user interface (HUD)
• Creation of groups' attire
• Creation of notecards
• Creation of groups' chat for inter-group
communication
• Creation of equipment boxes, one for each group,
containing: (a) Notecards, (b) Groups T-shirt (attire),
(c) Invitation to join the group.
• Editing of the manual concerning the rules of the
game and the usage of SL.
The programming language used for the implementation
of the game features and the virtual game objects, is the
Linden Scripting Language (LSL), of Second Life. The
virtual objects that have been created are presented in
following paragraphs.
B. Game Scoring - Awards
Each group’s total score is determined by the sum of
correct answers given by its members, during the game.
Groups have the opportunity to ask for extra help when they
face difficulties in answering a question. Each correct
answer, without the use of help, corresponds to one point
while each correct answer with the use of help corresponds
only to half points. Wrong answers don’t have a negative
rating. Throughout the entire game, players can anytime
monitor groups' progress and score on their screen monitor.
It is obvious that the more questions players find, the greater
the probability to attain a higher score for their group, simply
because there are more opportunities for correct answers.
The group with the highest score is the winner of the game.
The collection of awards is included in this game in order
to motivate and engage students. Therefore besides the main
winner prize there are also a set of other awards that the
participating groups can claim. These awards also determine
the winner of the game in case of a tie. More specifically, the
awards are as follows:
• Subject award: is given to the group that has
correctly answered all questions of a subject (i.e.
sound subject award).
• Exploration award: is given to the group that has
discovered the largest number of questions, even if
finally they have not answered them correctly.
• “Wise-Man” award: is given to the group that
doesn’t have any wrong answers.
IV.
A. The Virtual Game Space
GrAFiCA uses realistic 3D graphics and the game
space was build on a 8784sqm rented island in Second
Life. The main space of the game consists of six buildings,
each of which represents one specific subject from the course
curriculum. The appearance of the virtual buildings, as well
as the objects used to decorate them, was carefully designed
in order to refer visually to the corresponding subject. The
main buildings are (1) Building of “Communication Tools”,
(2) Building of “Compression-digitization”, (3) Building of
“Video-Animation”, (4) Building of “Hypertext”, (5)
Building of “Digital Image”, (6) Building of “Sound”
IMPLEMENTATION
Figure 2. Floor plan of virtual game space
Second Life (SL, www.secondlife.com) is the 3D
technological platform selected to be utilized for the
GrAFiCA game hosting. SL is a 3D multiuser virtual
environment which can support user-defined virtual worlds,
owned by its residents, in which people explore,
communicate and do business [15]. SL platform could be
used in order to develop educational spaces for supporting
CSCL scripted activities ([15], [16]), users' interactions
through the use of avatars and non-verbal communication
[12] and game based learning activities [17]. Moreover,
Second Life supports many features for augmenting avatars’
representation by offering tools for their modifications and
extension. Furthermore, SL supports a rich feature set,
facilitating communication and collaboration.
Fig. 2 depicts the floor plan of the virtual game space,
while Fig.3a presents the game lobby, and Fig.3b shows the
different colored shirts for each group of students-players.
(a) Lobby
(b) Avatars
Figure 3. Snapshots from game space and players
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B. Virtual game elements
The Virtual objects that decorate buildings are classified
into the following three categories:
• Question-objects: virtual objects with hidden
questions.
• Assistant-objects: virtual objects with auxiliary
course material, which provide players with useful
information.
• Dummy-objects: virtual decorative objects without
content. The existence of these objects contributes to
students’ Virtual exploration Skills improvement.
Fig.4 depicts a snapshot of the virtual game environment
and some its virtual objects.
followings: (a) a detailed game manual in text format, (b)
detailed instructions about entering the virtual world (c)
instructions how to create her/his avatar, (d) a direct teleport
link to the location of the game space island (e.g. SLurl,
Second Life URL), (e) in-world notecards containing all the
above game instructions and additional instructions about the
use of the virtual world of Second Life. According to [17], in
order to maximize the chances of successful collaborative
learning experiences in virtual worlds, it is recommended
that participants are trained well in advance. Hence, players
of the GrAFiCA game were invited to enter the virtual game
environment, before the official "game day", in a pre-game
familiarization phase. The duration of the GrAFiCA game
was, strictly by code, set to one hour. Players entered the
virtual game space and according to the given instructions,
started to collaboratively "hunt" questions at a rapid pace.
This results to a much shorter game-duration than the
predetermined one.
The students were asked to answer an electronic survey
two times: (a) before and (b) immediately after the game
session. The evaluation combined quantitative and
qualitative data gathering techniques. Quantitative data were
obtained from questionnaires, where qualitative data were
obtained from individual interviews, personal observations,
recorded videos and from groups’ discussion logs.
Concerning the participants' previous experience in virtual
environments, 55% of them had an experience in such
environments, which all related to digital games.
We then analyze the statistical conclusions regarding the
initial research questions.
Can virtual worlds be utilized by the game based
learning to improve the effectiveness of the knowledge
acquisition? The majority of participants (90%) believe that
virtual worlds have potential to be utilized by game based
learning in order to improve the knowledge acquisition.
What feelings created the experience of 3D virtual
environments to the students during their participation in
such a game learning activity? According to the
questionnaire completed by students before their
participation in the game activity, 45% declared that the
feelings that triggered them the experience from 3D virtual
environments were pleasant, 35% good, while others said
they did not caused them any emotion. After their
participation in the activity, the feeling of pleasure as well as
satisfaction increased by 10%, which indicates that the game
activity improved even slightly, their perception about 3D
virtual environments and found appealing to use them.
Did the virtual game activity motivate the participated
students to study better the course material? According to
the answers given, 55% and 10% out of the students agreed
and agreed completely that the virtual game activity
motivated them to study better the course curriculum,
whereas 25% were neutral and only 5% disagreed.
Do the students recommend the systematically existence
of such activities in education? Finally, it is remarkable that
students consider by 80% that there should be such activities
within the framework of their courses because they felt
pleased, entertained and additional facilitated from the
specific activity.
Figure 4. Snapshot of the game environment and its virtual objects
C. Virtual pedagogical elements
There are several human –computer interaction rules for
user interface design, which must be taken into account
when implementing any game. Designing a game interface is
often considered as one of the most challenging aspects of
the game development. The elements that were designed are
mainly focused to the students. The students’ game interface
is the main collaboration tool that supports them with the
necessary awareness about theirs and others group activities
and therefore about their progress in the game. User’s
interface was implemented with HUDs wear by the players,
occupying a little screen space of the default virtual
environment window. In detail, the user interface (Fig. 5)
includes the following indications: (a) time remaining till the
end of the game, (b) score of one’s group, (c) scores of other
groups, (d) awards gained by the group.
Figure 5. User’s interface -HUD
V.
EVALUATION: METHODOLOGY AND RESULTS
Twenty (20) undergraduate students, attending the
"Multimedia Systems" course, of the Informatics Department
in our University, participated in this case study, divided into
4 groups of five persons. All players were provided with
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migration of the game in open source virtual world
technologies, such as OpenSim (http://opensimulator.org).
After completion of the activity, students were asked to
give a short interview on the experience gained from their
participation in the game activity. The students in their
majority stated that it was an activity that attracted and
motivated them in general; "attractive", "innovative",
"interesting" were some of the words that students used to
characterize the specific activity. Indicatively a fascinated
student declared that "It was the best I saw during my studies
so far!". On the other hand, the interviews of the participants
highlighted some problems concerning the design of the
game. The small number of questions in proportion to the
total game duration and the number of the players was
identified as a major problem by the students. Another issue
that emerged from the interviews was the problematic
implementation of the question locking after a wrong answer
attempt, which resulted in some, albeit few, students not
being able to display and answer any questions.
VI.
REFERENCES
[1]
[2]
[3]
[4]
[5]
[6]
CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK
[7]
The main goal of the presented study was to investigate
the effectiveness of the 3D educational game at the tertiary
education. This goal seems to be validated from the students’
evaluation results. In general, findings revealed a positive
attitude and approach towards the adoption and exploitation
of 3D virtual environments utilized from game based
learning techniques, which need to be further investigated in
the future. As the presented study constitute an instant of a
larger research, as next steps, we aim to widen and
generalize it in order to propose a combined integrated
framework for the design, the implementation and the
evaluation of 3D serious games in virtual environments.
Thus, we plan iteratively to conduct variations of the
GrAFiCA game, gradually improved through the evaluation
process. Another future step is to implement specific object
in order to augment the Teacher’s Game Interface. With this
user interface, during the game and after its completion, the
teacher would have the ability to monitor students’ progress
and their contribution to the learning process through his/her
specifically designed user interface. In particular, the
teacher’s user interface will provide additional features to the
students’ user interface: (a) scores and awards for all groups,
(b) number of failed attempts, (c) number of help requests,
and (d) visual representation of each group’s virtual races
and its currently position at the game map. More specifically,
we plan to enhance our design framework to integrate the
following key aspects: (a) additional assistance to students
and furthermore to groups, in the form of an
anthropomorphic pedagogical agents, that will support the
collaboration among students' groups and the effective
implementation of the game scenario in general, (b)
independence from the learning subject, through data
configuration from the tutor, (c) automated virtual content
creation from predefined libraries through a properly
designed web-based user interface, (d) deployment and
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