BEACONING Analytics technology reused to teach videogame bachelor students
BEACONING Analytics technology reused to teach videogame bachelor students
BEACONING Analytics System is being reused in teaching lessons for students of the Videogame Development degree, in the Computer Science Faculty of the Complutense University of Madrid (Spain).
The students of the Videogame Development degree are being provided with the uAdventure serious games authoring tool including the BEACONING Analytics to teach them how to define, integrate and deploy analytics in a game they create. Usually teaching game analytics, while keeping full ownership of the data, is a hard task because it requires a complex infrastructure ranging from the game tracker to a centralized analytics server.
Students are provided with a simplified version of the serious game Conectado, including all the art assets, developed by the e-UCM Research Group with the aim to increase students’ awareness about bullying and cyberbullying. Conectado has been used to test the BEACONING analytics system and analytics understanding by teachers in actual schools with more than 1000 students, 100 teachers and 200 educational sciences students (in 10 schools all around Spain).
Building up from some parts of the game and using the serious game editor uAdventure, students are encouraged to design a new game story, decide the analytics they aim to extract and define the metrics they plan to apply to better understand what is happening in their games when users play. That is: what analytics information they are going to capture from their games, and how are they going to use that information.
In a second phase, and once that they fully understand the analytics process, students are required to integrate the analytics tracker in their games. In that case games can have more variability both in topic and even in the implementation technology (mainly Unity3D and javascript). This is demonstrating how even some of the BEACONING components can be reused and integrated in third parts games and products.
More information about Conectado game and validation of the analytics can be found at https://www.e-ucm.es/conectado/
The uAdventure serious games authoring tool is open-source and available at GitHub: https://github.com/e-ucm/uAdventure
More information about Game Learning Analytics can be found at the publication:
Ivan Perez-Colado, Cristina Alonso-Fernandez, Manuel Freire, Iván Martínez-Ortiz, Baltasar Fernández-Manjón (2018): Game Learning Analytics is not informagic!. IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON), April 18-20, 2018, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain.
