C. Shaun Longstreet

A meta-model for developing simulation games in higher education and professional development training

Games and simulations can be powerful educational tools for higher education and professional development training. At the same time, the labor and technical costs of development is sufficiently high that simulation games tend to be rather static and course or program specific. The main contribution of this paper is an effort to define a new meta-model for educational simulation games that is transferable to a broad range of disciplines and technical training fields. A meta-model provides a formal structure upon which similar categories of game play components are tied to specific learning objectives and easily updatable knowledge content while offering an infinite combination of playing experiences and maintaining consistent pedagogical standards. To illustrate, this paper draws from the application of our meta-model as used in developing a simulation game for software engineering education. Preliminary validation results are presented, in which the meta-model is used as a foundation in the architecture for a game development platform.

Software engineering senior design course: experiences with agile game development in a capstone project

The importance of capstone senior design project courses is widely recognized for undergraduate software engineering curricula. They provide students with an opportunity to integrate and apply theoretical knowledge (both from previous courses and newly acquired for the project) on a team, improving both their technical and soft-skills. Here, we report our experiences using an agile development method for a game project; this is a radical shift from our previous course offerings that were based on waterfall, model driven development. This report is unique and valuable, especially for software engineering education, which goes beyond the discipline-specific limits of computer science curricula.

Towards model-driven game engineering for serious educational games: Tailored use cases for game requirements

Educational games are essential in the next generation of e-learning tools because games stress visual and experiential learning; they require active involvement by student players while providing almost instantaneous feedback. The long term goal of this research project is to define a model-driven game engineering approach, SimSYS, that supports the rapid development of serious educational games across diverse educational topics. Here, we present our approach for modeling serious educational games, using tailored UML use cases (visual UML diagram and detailed tabular specifications). The tailored approach integrates features of storyboarding techniques (well-established in the game community), with use case modeling (well-established in the software engineering community). The use case model can be transformed into a formal XML representation that can be loaded by the SimSYS Game Play Engine. Part of a game on agile software development process is used for illustration.

Developing a Meta-Model for Serious Games in Higher Education

This short paper presents a preliminary meta-model for educational games. A meta-model facilitates the development of high-quality, engaging, educational games because it explicitly ties knowledge requirements, transferable skills and course outcomes to game production. Our meta-model is designed to be transferable across curricula, as it modularizes domain specific bodies of knowledge (BOK), a learning taxonomy (e.g., Blooms), and skill based challenges. The model situates learning opportunities in a plotline wherein the student-player advances by succeeding against non-player adversaries. Knowledge-based challenges framed by a learning taxonomy develop the transferable skills required by international accreditation standards and provide feedback to both the player and the faculty member. Situating assessment challenges in an immersive game environment makes them more engaging and imaginative than typical on-line tests or assignments. Here, we present our meta-model tailored for educational game development in software engineering education.

Using games in software engineering education to increase student success and retention

Summary form only given. Spoken language technologies have reached enough maturity to be integrated in many applications in eHealth and eLearning. The challenges and the potential are enormous. There are many other areas in which this claim could be equally made, but these two areas share many technical issues and, of course, they also share a huge significance from a social point of view. This was the driving force for our recent efforts at the Spoken Language Systems Lab of INESC-ID in terms of eHealth and eLearning. This talk tries to give an overview of these efforts and, in spite of the fact that they will be demonstrated for the Portuguese language, it will also try to emphasize how easily they can be extended to new languages.

Collaborative and cooperative games: Facts and assumptions

Collaboration and cooperation are fundamental activities and processes for humans. There has been a recent rise in the interest in collaborative and cooperative processes in several fields of study and an increasing popularity of commercial collaborative games. In this paper, we aim to identify how are collaboration and cooperation processes studied and promoted in the field of game research, with emphasis in digital games. To that end, we systematically analyzed two sets of data: academic publications on collaborative games and reviews of commercial collaborative games. From this examination, we acknowledge the important relationship between games and the cultural context, and we identify three main areas of study for this type of games (learning environments, interaction, and in-gameplay experience), which serve as a landscape for the investigation on collaborative and cooperative games.

Towards Model-Driven Requirements Engineering for Serious Educational Games: Informal, Semi-formal, and Formal Models

Serious educational games SEGs are receiving significant attention, as they provide immersive, engaging learning environments with a rigourous pedagogical foundation. SEG engineering requires an interdisciplinary approach involving game developers, educators, and software engineers. The requirements engineering RE community has substantial expertise in processes, notations, tools, and techniques. Here, we explore how can we tailor and adopt this expertise for developing SEGs with a three step model-based approach that integrates established techniques: create an informal model of the SEG requirements narrative captured like a storyboard; transform the narrative into a semi-formal, tailored UML use case model visual and tabular, using templates; transform the semi-formal model into formal models for testing and verification. A collection of SEGs test games has been created using the process; currently the transformations are performed manually. The formal model is represented in XML, which can be loaded, played, and tested in the game engine. In the future, we will explore semi-automatically transforming the models and creating Statechart models, which can be verified using simulations.

Experience report: A sustainable serious educational game capstone project

Capstone courses play a key role in many Computer Science/Software Engineering curricula. They offer a summative opportunity for SE students to apply their skills and knowledge in a single experience and prepare them for work in industry. Capstones have many attributes that make them a valuable high-impact practice, yet there are several challenges that can be associated with them. These challenges include the general nature of a capstone that prevents deeper applications of skills, not to mention the difficulty of creating an interesting and engaging design project upon which students can make meaningful contributions and engage in extensive team dynamics. This experience report outlines an innovative approach to a senior design capstone course that addresses common limitations of capstone courses. The SimSYS capstone course is unique in that it involved a mixed team organization involving a more senior design team who led a development team over the course of the semester, thereby leveraging the diverse experience of capstone students completing their CS/SE degree. The results point to solutions for continuing a capstone project successfully in subsequent semesters that could be of interest to other SE curriculum designers looking to develop effective capstone courses.

Semi-automated serious educational game generation: A component-based game engineering approach

The use of serious educational games has many advantages, offering immersive, engaging and fun environments that require deep thinking and complex problem solving within a construct of overcoming obstacles and challenges. Developing new games, however, to support broad and rapidly evolving disciplines has remained time consuming, expensive, and requiring the expertise of game designers, software developers, software engineering educators, and players. Here, we introduce a semi-automated component-based engineering approach for generating serious educational games, which enables educators to rapidly and independently develop their own games across diverse educational topics. The game components are presented in this paper using a simplified example game on basic algebra for illustration.

Curriculum design factors for constructing serious educational game: A learning objective centric approach

Educators and trainers face similar challenges in teaching specialized, rapidly evolving knowledge that often requires quick and cost-effective updates, working towards increased student time-on-task, and encouraging broad, active participation. The pedagogical potential for serious educational games to enhance the learning experience is recognized; however the development of games remains time consuming, expensive, and requiring substantial expertise from educators, game developers, and software engineers. New approaches are needed to effectively support instructors and trainers, typically experts in educational content, and enable them to rapidly and inexpensively deploy customized games. This short paper highlights the challenging and complex research issues in developing SEGs from a learning objective centric perspective, emphasizing the importance of closely establishing a connection between in-game activities and intended learning outcomes. It then presents initial work on a semi-automated, interactive approach that addresses the issue of developing a complex educational game design infrastructure for instructors.