Workshops

Benjamin Eugster, FFHS & René Barth, MLU Halle-Wittenberg
Chair: Stephan Winiker, HSLU
Room YU KAI CHOU

Educational games, gamification or simple puzzles and interactive content are strongly embedded in the digital learning ecosystem in order to increase learner engagement. Oftentimes though, these approaches are being used uncritically regarding their implications for the resulting learning culture. The limited perception of the limits and potentials of game-based learning should not be regarded as fundamental critique but rather as the starting point of the further development of methodical and technological approaches to game-based learning design.

On the basis of a project-based course for students in teachers‘ education, we will present a conceptual framework to critically reflect, develop and create gameful learning content in cooperation with students. In its third iteration, the course offers a wide range of opportunities to reflect on the usage of games in teaching as an object of analysis in its own regard, to critically analyse existing approaches to gamification and serious games and to find low-threshold possibilities to embed game-based design strategies into their own teaching practice.

• Presentation slides

 

Creating an online escape room with "Lesespuren Online"

Michael Mittag, FHNW
Chair: Hervé Platteaux, UNIFR
Room DEMOCRATIA

Online Escape Rooms make game-based learning affordable and versatile. An escape room can be created by one person in a few hours and incorporate almost any learning material. In this workshop, you’ll create your very own online escape room using lesespuren-online.ch, a free online tool I’ve created.

Topics include:

• Telling a compelling story
• Providing learning material
• Using metaphors
• Reacting to student progress
• Stacking difficulty (and thus eliminating guessing)

The escape room works for any subject matter. It’s easiest to implement for:

• Declarative knowledge, such as naming the stages in Kohlberg’s development theory or getting them in the correct order
• Letting players find errors in a text or picture
• Anything that involves pictures or other media to process

In addition to building and testing the knowledge of players, you can also let your creative juices flow and create a powerful real-world setting, a rich fantasy world or a funny story with weird, wonderful and memorable characters.

 

A systematic design path towards effective serious games

Mounsif Chetitah, University of Würzburg
Chair: Hervé Platteaux, UNIFR
Room OCTALYSIS

Games! These magic circles bound by rules and explored through mechanics create amazing experiences for players. Their playful nature made them a perfect candidate to facilitate learning. Although the idea of gamifying learning is appealing, a couple of fundamental questions arise: How to embed knowledge about a specific domain in game elements? How to utilise the established pedagogical concepts in a games without altering their immersive nature? We have been investigating these questions and a couple more in order to evolve a Design and Development Framework for Effective Serious Games where instructional design elements are seamlessly mapped to game design elements.

 

Design your own analogue serious games

Wolfgang Rathert, HSLU
Chair: Hervé Platteaux, UNIFR
Room BJ FOGG

Serious Games do not need to be complicated, time consuming or expensive. With the right "mind-set", you can easily translate a content into an experiential setting.

In this workshop you will learn a step-by-step approach on how to develop your own mini serious games.

We will show two examples, one from the domain of team development, and one from the domain of accounting. You will then have the opportunity to design a prototype of your own mini serious game.

• Notes on Wolfang's Miro Board

 

How to structure and implement gamification elements – Bring your own setting

Max Monauni, HSLU
Chair: Hervé Platteaux, UNIFR
Room MIHALY

HOW TO GAMIFY YOUR WORLD?

Can you think of any product or service, customer experience or workplace setting, training or learning pattern, or something else in your life where additional engagement would be nice?

Then challenge this and come to town – not exactly your home town, but gather.town and join my workshop. Get to know different gamification elements and bring your own setting in order to directly apply them to your own challenges. There will be an introduction to the principles of human-focused design with reference to Yu-Kai Chou's Octalysis framework.

Warning: This is an interactive workshop – so don’t you dare deactivating your camera and microphone :-) That might also explain my avatar’s large green ears for listening to participants’ issues very closely…

• Presentation slides

 

Finding solutions for computer-based assessment of collaborative skills: Gamification as inpiration

Antonia Bonaccorso & Tobias Halbherr, ETHZ
Chair: Renato Furter, SWITCH
Room BLOXELS

In this workshop, we will draw a spotlight on assessing socially mediated and collaborative competencies in computer-based examination environments. Over the past decade, a variety of computer-based examination architectures have evolved that facilitate assessing 21^st century skills such as critical thinking, information literacy, or computational competencies by granting students access to authentic disciplinary resources under secure and fraud-proof conditions. Students write and analyse programs, calculate statistics, design machine parts, diagnose virtual patients, or research scientific articles in an academic database to formulate an argument. The Covid pandemic and the need for suitable pedagogies for hard-to-supervise remote online examinations has dramatically accelerated this trend towards complex resource-mediated and/or open-book examinations over the last two years.

However, all these approaches remain intent on assessing students performing strictly individually and under completely isolated conditions.  The development of practicable and scalable examinations for assessing students’ individual competencies in collaborative performances and in socially mediated skills however still remains largely unaddressed.

In this interactive workshop, we want to discuss the challenges to this difficult project with you and brainstorm possible inroads together. For inspiration, we will look to work on gamification, notably serious games, computer-based assessment and collaborative learning. We will share our ideas on promising didactical designs for scalable high-stakes assessments of socially mediated skills and outline a possible roadmap for technological implementation with tools such as Safe Exam Browser, Safe Exam Browser Server, and Moodle. The workshop will follow a format of multiple cycles of brief inputs followed by breakout discussions followed by a plenary synthesis facilitated by online collaboration tools.

• Presentation slides

 

Actionbound for beginners

Moritz Behrmann-Fink & Ercan Oguz, Actionbound
Chair: Renato Furter, SWITCh
Room OXOCARD

• What is Actionbound and how does it work?
• Get to know the basics of the browser based Bound-Creator
• Collaboration and co-creation – Instant accounts for group work
• Pimp your Bound – Bound Styler and multi-language tool

You want more details? An employee of Actionbound will answers your questions via chat throughout the event.