Workshop theme and background
Nowadays edTech (educational technology) is invading our classrooms, and it couldn't be any other way, since technology is continuously getting more and more pervasive in our day to day lives overall.
In this context very often teachers are leveraging a "self-made" and improvised use of technology that involves the use of several heterogeneous online resources such as: sharing files into online repositories, sharing videos and audio clips from YouTube, providing instant quiz games, using online tools in self provisioning and so on.
One of the main problems of such an approach is that in the end it is very difficult for teachers to collect and analyse all the feedback and data gathered, since these are dispersed across many different tools and digital resources.
Paradoxically instead of fostering teaching, such use of technology in education potentially represents an overload of effort and time consumption.
The challenge that the Beaconing project aims to overcome is to provide teachers and learning designers with a unique platform to author, manage and monitor their classroom while providing a gamified environment to their students where they will learn STEM topics, having fun along the way.
More specifically the Beaconing project, focusing on STEM learning, aims to provide contextualised, widespread and gameful learning experiences by exploiting pervasive, context-aware and gamified techniques and technologies, framed under the Problem-Based Learning approach.
Learning content will be provided to learners through a gamified 3D meta-game environment implementing a sci-fi narrative fiction in which the player will be engaged in missions and quests represented by different kinds of activities.
These activities can be location based missions where players will be asked to collect pieces of evidence in specific places of their town, in-App mini game challenges to assess or train their STEM knowledge, or traditional in-classroom activities.
Teachers and learning designers, through an authoring pipeline supporting multiple roles, will have the power to author gamified lesson paths tailored to their student's needs that will be experienced as gamified missions that must be completed in order to proceed in the sci-fi fictional adventure game.
Through the experience Apis (xAPI) tracking support, and a powerful and flexible learning analytics platform, it will be possible for the teachers to assess and monitor their students' progress, and for the players to monitor their leaderboard progress against the Beaconing community of learners.
The Realising an Applied Gaming Eco-system (RAGE) project aims to develop, transform and enrich advanced technologies from the leisure games industry into self-contained gaming assets that support game studios in developing applied games easier, faster and more cost-effectively.
Key RAGE project assets have been developed to ensure a seamless exchange of "Real Time" performance DATA via the xAPI technical standard. This provides the educator with the opportunity to anlyse performance data to ensure learning experiences can be personalized in response to players performance and learning context either algorithmically or manually.