The Use of Game World Tasks Concepts in Higher Education

The link between tasks presented in games and tasks used in higher education might have more in common than we think. Analysing how tasks work in games and applying those structures to higher education teaching can enable teachers to develop more creative, situated and exciting tasks for their students. In addition, it can improve communication and feedback. Analysis shows that tasks are an area where elements of gamification work. This article looks into the possibility of reproducing the flexibility and key components of game tasks in actual tasks in higher education. We look at the challenges and limitations and ways to solve them. Therefore, we analyse the concept of quest-logs in games…

Development of a Task-driven Mobile Teaching Tool for Enhancing Teachers’ Motivation

Towards a Game-Design Framework for Evidence-Based Clinical Procedure Libraries

Serious games have been and currently are used for multiple purposes other than just entertainment, such as education, healthcare or emergency management. This research presents game-design elements based on specific functional and professional requirements among which usability plays a key role. The aim of the research is to steer the direction towards a game-design framework for evidence-based clinical procedure libraries (eCPL). For context analysis and game-element presentation, a "serious application" example is shown to illustrate the improvement through game-design elements. A context analysis was required to select suitable game-design elements to target system usability and solve s…

Investigating teachers motivation to use ICT tools in higher education

There are a lot of information and communication technology (ICT) tools for education, but the motivation to use those varies from teacher to teacher. In this paper we present results of an international survey on teachers' use of ICT tools in education. The purpose of the survey was to find out what motivates teachers to use ICT tools in the context of teaching. The survey also intended to reveal which tools are used as well as the needs and requirements that are not covered by the existing tools. Most of the 45 respondents suggested that the integration of tools depends on how well they fit into the learning and teaching process and how easy it is to integrate them. The first category of …

Using Multi-touch Multi-user Interactive Walls for Collaborative Active Learning

Active learning has been advocated for enhancing students’ higher order cognition in social constructivist learning settings. However, with the increasing use of student-owned computing devices in face-to-face classrooms, there are risks of limited student-student interactions. Students are likely to be distracted by non-academic activities, hence becoming inactive with regards to the learning tasks. This article presents a technology enhanced learning approach, in which students perform group learning tasks using shared digital workspace while in a physical classroom. The workspace comprises of a 9-m wide screen wall with multi-touch, multi-user interfaces supporting multimodal interaction…

User-Centered Design of a Scenario-Based Serious Game: Game-Based Teaching of Future Healthcare

A scenario-based serious game for teaching about healthcare solutions was developed and tested in multiple iterations. The serious game captures the complexity of a real-world healthcare scenario, projecting it into a “scenario system” that can be accessed by the game participants to explore and experience the playthrough of a critical healthcare situation. The aim is to teach about existing health technology, and its uses and interactions between healthcare professionals, technologies, and patients. The platform for the serious game is mobile, such that different locations can be chosen for different scenarios. Actions of the participants trigger further actions, tasks, and storyline progr…

Teaching Students to Learn

High-Level Context Information for Tasks in Teaching

Tasks are often used in the teaching process. Using mobile and wearable technology, we created an application which uses sensors to support teachers in creating tasks with dependencies and feedback generation. However, in the field of sports education, a variety of non-measurable data can influence the training progress. This high-level context data can be gathered using human input. In this paper, we explain the task-based teacher supporting application and how it can be enriched with high-level context data. We use gamification for data collection and motivation of students. We conducted a survey about the acceptance of three different approaches in the field of skiing education. The surv…

Towards Personalization of Peer Review in Learning Programming

Peer review is one of the effective processes for sharing knowledge and improving overall learning performance. This became more popular by the use of ICT. However, it is challenging to implement peer review in learning programming languages due to the complexity of the subject matter. A group of peer reviewers may have different overall performance but similar weaknesses on a given aspect of the programming tasks. Hence, they may not be able to help each other to address individual needs. In this paper, we present a personalized approach to peer review with consideration to criteria based assessment and individual performance on specific programming tasks. This is achieved using a novel pe…

Ethical issues of gamified ICT tools for higher education

A recent trend in e-learning is the development of ICT tools with game elements to increase the motivation of using new technology in teaching and learning. In most cases, games possess different ethical constraints than regular e-learning systems. For this reason, additional implications and issues deriving from the combined development of games and e-learning technology have to be considered. During the development process of gamified e-learning systems as well as during the use of gamified ICT tools in education special attention must be paid to ethical constraints. This paper presents ethical considerations as to how to properly motivate teachers to adopt new technology in their teachin…

Scenario-based Serious Game to Teach about Healthcare

Author's accepted manuscript (postprint). © 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. Available from 29/10/2021. In this paper, we explore the concept of a scenario-based serious game for healthcare solutions. The complexity of the interactions and the multitude of actors is captured in a scenario, which is then played with the help of an additional game pl…

Supporting teachers' needs within and through E-learning systems

These days more and more digital learning and teaching opportunities emerge into the world of higher education. In this upcoming project which is described in this paper, the teachers' needs, especially their teaching motivation will be regarded. This project is part of a bigger project, where several different faculties will work together. This combination of faculties is beneficial for topics like these, because the approach combines pedagogical and technical knowledge. This topic regarding teachers' needs deals with the initial and ongoing motivation as well as behavior and attitudes toward current or upcoming ICT systems for education. The main aspect of the project is to specify issues…