E-learning

INESC TEC Science Bits – Episode 6

PODCAST INESC TEC Science Bits (17:46 – 24,4 MB)

Guest Speakers:

António Coelho, Centre for Information Systems and Computer Graphics

Leonel Morgado, Centre for Information Systems and Computer Graphics

Keywords: e-leaning | videogames |immersive environments | gamification | industry | education

Education and Industry: COVID-19 pandemic has strengthened and promoted teleworking

In Education, we have been discovering that learning can occur in many places, not only in the classroom. Using mobile devices, students can study distinct topics outside the classroom, using pervasive games. Imagine that you are at the beach, and you can learn about the period and frequency of electromagnetic waves with a game about surfing waves on the sea. This was the main goal of one of the flagship projects in the H2020 EU program – BEACONING, with INESC TEC participation. The main contribution was a platform for learning “anytime and anywhere” using a games-based approach.

On the other hand, Industry will be able to hire people globally and not only locally. As a small country and with highly qualified professionals, Portugal can benefit from this. This is something that is occurring nowadays in Informatics Engineering, for example.

How can technology help mitigate the differences between the physical and online environments?

Due to the pandemic and its sudden changes, people now realise that working online is not just about doing videoconferences: the dynamics change completely. And things actually work! Therefore, the change in confidence, for the better, and the widespread awareness that working online is different [from physical work] will be powerful movers of these technologies.

The idea stemmed from the desire to find ways to complement fieldwork, laboratory and hands-on activities in general. There are already many solutions for this, but people didn’t perceive them as a priority. Now they do. At INESC TEC, we’ve developed a simulator for teamwork on F16 aircraft engine maintenance, in cooperation with the Portuguese Air Force; simulators for unmanned submarines for the ICARUS projects; cooperation tools so people can collect data form the field and share them online; version-control services for 3D models, in support of urban planning discussions, and even remote theatrics, like a student being able to control the mythical Adamastor giant using body movements remotely, or elders working out while over 100 km apart from each other, in an online gym.

Which tools can support teachers and students during the learning process?

Technology has a huge potential to promote change, but adoption is only achieved with tools that are easy to use and that adapt to learning practices. Teachers are the main resource in Education, and so tools must be teacher-context-aware, automating and diminishing the technological effort, using the teacher context to free teachers from administrative tasks, allowing educators to focus on the educational actions.

In the H2020 project BEACONING, this was addressed in an interesting way, by creating an ecosystem with distinct players focusing on their competences.

Game designers create game narratives as building blocks. Educational instructors or learning designers then create what we call “Gamified Learning Plans” that incorporate these game narratives with challenges (such as mini-games), which are used to achieve specific learning objectives. Teachers are then be able to select and adapt these “Gamified Learning Plans” to their classes, using very simple visual interfaces. And they are able to monitor students’ progression and make individual variations for each one. This enables a high level of personalisation of learning.

No one was expecting COVID-19 to go on for months and months. How can one keep the students or employees motivated, while managing a large number of people in the long run?

The main problem with this sudden change in the learning paradigm was the management effort and engagement. In class, teachers are able to motivate students with distinct strategies that they can adjust on the fly according to each class/student characteristics and their experience and competencies. However, in e-learning, embodied communication is much more limited and digitally mediated. Therefore, the same strategies do not work feasibly and have to be adapted.

In a way, learning has been emancipated, giving students much more autonomy on their learning progression. This autonomy must be supported by distinctive structural mechanisms, which can be easily adopted and understood by students. I resort to gamification, since students are well acquainted to the game feedback principles.

Gamification means using gaming elements and techniques to improve motivation and engagement in non-game processes. For instance, we can give feedback on the students’ progression by using score and progression bars. Depending on the students’ success, they are rewarded with points or badges, and at certain milestones, they can move to distinct game levels, thus acknowledgingtheir effort. In my personal experience, one of the great benefits of gamification is the improved feedback and the activity loops that give the students easy structures (challenges and levels) to improve their learning method for a specific course.

Currently, gamification is also being used in the Industry for several purposes, such as collaborators/clients’ engagement, efficiency gains and human resources.

Does teaching with video games or about video games has many fans?

Videogames are at the forefront of nowadays’ creative industries. The role of other arts and media in the past as exciting new frontiers of self-expression and communication is now played by videogames. It is a way of expression where the consumer (the player) must absolutely interact with the artefact, otherwise it doesn’t exist. In a sense, the game is created both by the game studio and by the player, each time it is played.

This means games are a kind of human artefact for creative dialogue. So, instead of talking or showing models, rules, consequences, teachers can provide students with experiences with those models, rules, consequences… and instead of just discussing them, students can live them, test them, demonstrate their intent. It’s a dynamic process, and teaching about the social consequences of laws, the physical emergence of properties from rules and the economic consequences arising from management decisions, can become experiences and be demonstrated with games, something previously almost impossible.

This uniqueness of games across the board of human expression has spawned immense interest, regarding both their use and the techniques for their creation, which is why we have teamed up with the Portuguese Society of Videogame Sciences and organised the first Seminar about Videogame Education, last year. Almost all higher-education institutions in Portugal that work on videogames were represented, and there is great expectation for the emergence of a cluster of competences in this field.

Next step: immersion and tools!

We now know that great experiences must immerse the participants, using technological systems, but also great narratives and challenges to engage the participants, generating sensory and mental absorption.

This requires novel ways to describe and analyse what is going on. We are working on taking the BEACONING ideas further, into all sorts of rich, immersive activities, and calling it the Inven!RA platform for inventive activities. Moreover, we’re developing a a really novel concept named Virtual Choreographies: by defining as a choreography a pattern of events with virtual participants and objects, we can enable people to explain what they care about, what is supposed to happen (for instance “the handball team adopts this or that offensive tactic”). And we can identify events as patterns to support teachers’ or managers’ analysis. For instance, in the GReSBAS and FEEdBACk projects, we collected data on office users’ behaviour regarding energy consumption, and instead of analysing long lists of schedules and locations, we can classify specific behaviours with higher semantics, such as “leaving the computer on while having lunch” or “the last person leaving the office turns the light off”. We believe that such meaning-rich patterns are incredibly powerful for understanding what happens in immersive online environments, and will be essential for their widespread adoption.