Project description
Digital libraries and technology-enhanced learning
80DAYS has developed a demonstrator for a compelling game to support learning and teaching geography.
Project Goals
The European research project 80Days is inspired by Jules Verne’s novel “Around the world in eighty days”. The project ran from April 2008 to September 2010 and aimed at developing psycho-pedagogical and technological foundations for successful digital educational games - successful in terms of educational effectiveness as well as financial turnovers.
The focus of psycho-pedagogical research efforts was a scientifically sound framework for a non-invasive assessment of knowledge and learning progress embedded in a game and a subsequent comprehensive adaptation to the learner on micro and macro levels. The micro level refers to subtle educational interventions such as feedback or hinting within specific learning situations. The macro level, on the other hand, refers to an educationally appropriate sequencing and pacing of learning situations tailored to the individual learner.
Final Results
During the project, the consortium made significant progress by elaborating a joint formal model of cognitive assessment of learning progress (on the basis of Competence-based Knowledge Space Theory) on a probabilistic and non-invasive level, the provision of suitable support and interventions, and open interactive adaptive storytelling.
From a technical point of view, an accurate analysis of learning and game design requirements was carried out and the results constituted the starting point for the study on system architectures and software modules that could best fulfill the requirements. Research in the area of open, interactive storytelling achieved a technical realisation of the developed formal model in form of a story engine that implements the psycho-pedagogical model and drives and adapts the game.
Overall, psycho-pedagogical and technical efforts lead to a compelling demonstrator game for teaching geography. Significantly, this demonstrator also represents the substantial steps towards achieving a multi-adaptive system that not only adapts discrete elements of the game towards educational purposes, but also adapts the story to accommodate larger educational objectives.
The demonstrator game teaches geography and follows European curricula. Its target audience is 12 to 14 year old students. In this adventure game a learner takes the role of an Earth kid. The game starts when an UFO lands in the backyard of a student's house and an alien named Feon contacts the player. Feon is an alien scout who has to collect information about Earth. The player assists the alien to explore the planet and to create a report about the Earth and its geographical features. This is accomplished by the player by flying to different destinations on Earth, exploring them, and collecting and acquiring geographical knowledge.
Empirical findings yielded beneficial effect of playing the game, as evident and an overall satisfying usability and user experience. Implications for the future development of the game prototypes and the design of evaluative activities have been drawn. In particular, the theoretical knowledge and practical experience thus gained will contribute to advancing the research area of evaluating usability and user experience in digital educational games.
Recreational computer games are overwhelmingly popular. Hence, there is no doubt that educational games, which combine effective learning with fun and pleasure, are a desirable vision. Still, educational games, which can compete with their non-educational counterparts in terms of narrative and gaming quality, have not yet entered the market – especially those for children who are used to the quality of computer games. The main reason is the difficulty in merging both game and educational environments. To cross today's horizon of educational games, a scientifically sound and valid methodological and technological foundation is required. Grounding on this mission, 80Days is a RTD project concerned with theories, methodologies, and technologies for game-based learning. To accomplish a significant step towards successful and effective educational games, 80Days is addressing the following two main objectives: First, integrating models of adaptive personalised learning with those of adaptive interactive storytelling, and second, merging virtual game environments with existing learning resources, thus reducing development costs and time. These fusions will result in an adaptive and responsive system, enabling the understanding of active learning processes within a virtual learning environment, adapting to individual needs and abilities, and therefore fully exploiting the learners' capabilities. The quality of this approach will be assured by evaluation activities based on theoretically and empirically sound methods. 80Days entails the smooth integration of interdisciplinary work (learning science, storytelling, game and didactic design, game development, and human-computer interaction). 80Days delivers an innovative and advanced methodological and technological framework for effectively developing successful educational games to be demonstrated by a geography game prototype realising gaming/learning scenarios inspired by Jules Verne's "Around the world in eighty days".
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
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Call for proposal
FP7-ICT-2007-1
See other projects for this call
Funding Scheme
CP - Collaborative project (generic)Coordinator
8010 Graz
Austria