Results of the 3 validation experiments of Beaconing LA published at Q1 Journal

The results of the three experiments carried out to validate the Beaconing Learning Analytics System have been accepted for publication at the Computer in Human Behavior journal (journal ranking Q1, Impact Factor 3.536).

The three pilots included on the article are:

• Conectado: game designed as a tool to be used by the teachers in the classroom to address bullying and cyberbullying. GLA was used in Conectado to improve validation and deployment in schools.
• DownTown: game designed for promoting independence in users with intellectual disabilities; and its use of GLA illustrates how to
  validate a game design in situations where information cannot be directly gathered from the users.
• First Aid Game: game designed to teach first-aid maneuvers to teenagers, and had already been formally validated. The use of GLA for the First Aid Game focuses on improving the evaluation and deployment of games by applying data mining models to predict students’ knowledge after playing based on interaction data.

The abstract of the article is as follows:

Serious Games have already proved their advantages in different educational environments. Combining them with Game Learning Analytics can further improve the life-cycle of serious games, by informing decisions that shorten development time and reduce development iterations while improving their impact, therefore fostering their adoption. Game Learning Analytics is an evidence-based methodology based on in-game user interaction data, and can provide insight about the game-based educational experience promoting aspects such as a better assessment of the learning process. In this article, we review our experiences and results applying Game Learning Analytics for serious games in three different scenarios: (1) validating and deploying a game to raise awareness about cyberbullying, (2) validating the design of a game to improve independent living of users with intellectual disabilities and (3) improving the evaluation of a game on first aid techniques. These experiences show different uses of game learning analytics in the context of serious games to improve their design, evaluation and deployment processes. Building up from these experiences, we discuss the results obtained and provide lessons learnt from these different applications, to provide an approach that can be generalized to improve the design and application of a wide range of serious games in different educational settings.

Article will be available at the Zenodo Beaconing Community: https://zenodo.org/record/3236038#.XPDt5u0zOgo