Carlos Vaz de Carvalho

Serious Games for Lean Manufacturing: The 5S Game

The global economic crisis makes it necessary to increase business competitiveness. Lean is a manufacturing philosophy that deserves the attention of employers and their employees, since its objectives are to increase productivity, reduce waste, and optimize available resources. The 5S method is a lean tool that can improve productivity by improving the organization of the workplace. A brief survey of the market showed that there are several organizations dedicated to training and sharing this type of knowledge but only a few of them have digital tools available. Therefore, the use of a digital serious game that helps to understand the 5S method can effectively support an alternative form of learning. This article proposes a serious game that aims to respond to this need. This practical approach encourages the player to learn by trial and error. Information displayed throughout the game enhances learning, without a cognitive overload for the player. The games evaluation has shown that our approach is efficient and results in the learning of 5S concepts.

Is game-based learning suitable for engineering education?

A simple evaluation question for any educational software is: did the students learn, by using that product, what they were supposed to? It is a simple question to ask, but difficult to answer because learning is an individual process and there are normally too many factors involved. Therefore, benchmarking educational software is a complex task and a complete evaluation process requires a holistic approach where the evaluator, in order to understand how students learn, must determine how and whether the learning objectives were achieved with the educational software. When we talk about Game-Based Learning, we refer to a very specific type of educational software, games, with very definite properties and characteristics. Games develop personal characteristics that can contribute to becoming a good engineer. The purpose of this article is to present an evaluation framework that assesses the efficiency of this pedagogical approach in Engineering Education.

Serious gaming for experiential learning

In Engineering Education, the traditional process of knowledge building was based on one-way (teacher->student) delivery of information, in classrooms. Students were passive receptors of the teachers messages. In the past few years, the tendency is to implement active learning paradigms where students are the focus of the educational process. The interaction between teacher and students is more dynamic, enhanced by technological tools and includes rich content and flexible activities. The integration of Virtual Environments in Engineering Education allows new and innovative learning methods and is, therefore, a contribution to these new paradigms. This article presents the instantiation of these learning methods with first year engineering students. In our study, students were involved in simulation/gaming environments related to fundamental physics learning. Afterwards their knowledge was tested and their perception of the relevance of the system was evaluated. Results show that knowledge construction was greatly enhanced and that students motivation for learning was increased.

Lean Learning Academy: An innovative framework for lean manufacturing training

Worldwide competitiveness poses enormous challenges on managers, demanding a continuous quest to increase rationality in the use of resources. As a management philosophy, Lean Manufacturing focuses on the elimination of activities that do not create any type of value and therefore are considered waste. For companies to successfully implement the Lean Manufacturing philosophy it is crucial that the human resources of the organization have the necessary training, for which proper tools are required. At the same time, higher education institutions need innovative tools to increase the attractiveness of engineering curricula and develop a higher level of knowledge among students, improving their employability. This paper describes how Lean Learning Academy, an international collaboration project between five EU universities and five companies, from SME to Multinational/Global companies, developed and applied an innovative training programme for Engineers on Lean Manufacturing, a successful alternative to the traditional teaching methods in engineering courses.

TimeMesh: Producing and Evaluating a Serious Game

Serious Games are specifically designed to develop mental abilities and skills such as strategy, mental calculation and decision making but the acquisition of deep knowledge with Serious Games is less well understood. To improve this understanding, a game called TimeMesh, as well as the needed graphic engine, called TimeMesh engine, -a multi-player graphical adventure engine inspired by the 90s graphic adventures created by LucasArts- have been developed. Time--Mesh has been designed to impart knowledge and competences in the area of History and Geography. To test the acquisition of knowledge with Time-mesh a complete process of evaluation was designed, divided in three parts, always with user intervention: first, with the game developers, then with teachers and lastly, but most importantly with students. In this paper we present our experience in designing, implementing and evaluating TimeMesh and formulate the conclusions of this study.

Innovative Approaches to Serious Games

The field of serious games (SGs) focuses on the design, development, application, and use of games for other purposes beyond entertainment. Education and training are the main application areas, but SG has been successfully used in different domains such as health, research, planning, emergency situations, advertising, and military for different purposes. However, despite the evidence of their effectiveness, displayed also in this IEEE RITA issue, there is still limited use of SG. There could be many reasons behind this (e.g., cost), but we think it has mainly to do with social issues and preconceptions about using games for serious purposes. Therefore, initiatives like the SEGAN network are very relevant because they address the need to systematize approaches to SG. SEGAN is a community of practice that promotes the exchange of ideas and experiences related to SG. We think it can be the right place to continue and extend the discussion on the high-quality articles that we present in this special edition about innovative approaches to SG.

A semantic approach for learning objects repositories with knowledge reuse

In this paper we discuss how the inclusion of semantic functionalities in a Learning Objects Repository allows a better characterization of the learning materials enclosed and improves their retrieval through the adoption of some query expansion strategies. Thus, we started to regard the use of ontologies to automatically suggest additional concepts when users are filling some metadata fields and add new terms to the ones initially provided when users specify the keywords with interest in a query. Dealing with different domain areas and having considered impractical the development of many different ontologies, we adopted some strategies for reusing ontologies in order to have the knowledge necessary in our institutional repository. In this paper we make a review of the area of knowledge reuse and discuss our approach.

Tuberculosis en los portugueses residentes en el extranjero

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OTILIA — An architecture for the recommendation of teaching-learning techniques supported by an ontological approach

The creation of computer-based design tools to help teachers in designing learning scenarios, more precisely teaching-learning activities, has great importance in education. Those tools are most valuable if enriched with special features as, for example, templates, scripts or wizards used to guide the teacher through the design process. Recommendation mechanisms anchored in solid theoretical achievements are currently a huge challenge in the scientific research. This paper presents a proposal for teaching-learning techniques recommendation supported by an ontological modeling approach. The recommendation aims to assist educators in designing of teaching-learning activities. The recommendation process is part of the ACEM model which integrates an authoring design tool. We propose that the recommendation mechanism will help teachers preparing those activities and improving the use of different learning techniques.

TimeMesh – A Serious Game for European Citizenship

Serious games are games where the entertainment aspect is not the most relevant motivation or objective. TimeMesh is an online, multi-language, multiplayer, collaborative and social game platform for sharing and acquiring knowledge of the history of European regions. As such it is a serious game with educational characteristics. This article evaluates the use of TimeMesh with students of 13 and 14 years-old. It shows that this game is already a significant learning tool about European citizenship.