SGoCSL 2017 Abstracts

Short Papers
Short Papers
Paper Nr: 1
Title:

Serious Games in Autism Spectrum Disorder - An Example of Personalised Design
Authors:

Ersilia Vallefuoco, Carmela Bravaccio and Alessandro Pepino
Abstract: Over the last decade, several studies evaluated the use of Serious Games as tools to encourage the development of communication, the process of learning, and social behaviour in people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) alongside traditional therapeutic approaches. The proposed study intends to employ and rate the use of Serious Games to create personalised interactive environments aimed to improve the learning of educational content in children with ASD. In particular, a multidisciplinary team supported the design and development of the serious game to allow a personalised approach.
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Paper Nr: 4
Title:

Co-creative Serious Games Design Process using Nonlinear Storyline Editing
Authors:

Mika Letonsaari, Jukka Selin and Mikko Lampi
Abstract: Here we present a serious game development process. The process is characterized by the collaboration in the development by contributors of wide range of skills, including end-users with no special skills in information technology. The aim of the game is to teach a broad range of information and communication technology skills as well as general practices required in the working life. For this purpose a rich content open world multiplayer game has been developed. The game design is highly modular allowing concurrent and continuous development process. Modular tasks are learning experiences crafted by experts in certain aspect of target skills. But tasks themselves can be customized easily without special skills. Especially, interactive non-linear dialogues between user and computer controlled characters inside the tasks can be created by end-users.
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Paper Nr: 5
Title:

An Adaptive, Competence based, Approach to Serious Games Sequencing in Technology Enhanced Learning
Authors:

Luca Cuoco, Andrea Sterbini and Marco Temperini
Abstract: We present a platform for Technology Enhanced Learning, allowing the learner to follow a path of game applications towards a learning objective. The path is determined by the learner, by selecting each time the next game of her choosing. The games are defined by teachers and experts, or even imported as web resources: they are associated to the system through suitable metadata, that express their pedagogical meaning. The system’s interface allows the student to navigate the repository of learning games (organized as a graph) and see among them those that she can select to undertake, and those that are not yet affordable. Whether a game is affordable, at a given moment, is determined by comparing the Student Model with the game’s specification. In conclusion, the path of learning activities followed by the learner is built interactively, by the learner, according to learner’s choice and the system’s pedagogical guidance. The system has not yet been experimented in a real class: we report about its design and implementation, and provide the reader with some simulated applications showing the system’s behaviour.
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Paper Nr: 6
Title:

Learning Concurrency Concepts while Playing Games
Authors:

Cornelia P. Inggs, Taun Gadd and Justin Giffard
Abstract: We think that people will find it easier to learn concurrency concepts if they can play a game that challenges the player to solve puzzles using the same techniques required by a programmer to develop concurrent programs. This article presents two such games in which multiple threads of control are represented by multiple avatars that can perform actions concurrently in a game environment. The player controls the avatars by specifying a sequence of actions for each avatar to execute using a block-based visual syntax, independent of programming language. The avatars execute their actions in the game environment, showing the effect of every action.
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Paper Nr: 3
Title:

Context Rich Digital Games for Better Learnability in the IT Project Management Context
Authors:

Charu Monga, Jayant Jain, Sunny Kumar and Athavale Sandeep
Abstract: Application of serious gaming has become well known in corporate sector for training and development. It is often used for enhancing skills of decision making, analytical thinking, planning and execution. Though numerous games have been developed in training professionals in sectors such as manufacturing, education, health care and sports, very less have been developed for IT professionals. It has been proven in literature that the project management owing to its nature of work in IT organization is very different from these sectors. This also implies that the skills needed for project management must be very specific to IT industry. In our study, a game is designed with a primary focus on richness of context with a purpose of improving decision-making skills of a Project Manager in Information Technology (IT) organization. We conducted contextual survey along with literature review for identifying the scenarios, and user journey of project manager. Knowing the context, an analogy of hospital scenarios was applied for ideation and concept generation for this video game. The designed prototype was evaluated with fourteen users for meeting the learning and play objectives. Our findings suggest that serious games using an analogy (i.e., hospital scenario in this study) can be engaging and purposeful learning tools, when the user context is well understood, converted to an equivalent game play and situated in a metaphorical, fantasized or analogical world.
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