Experiments were conducted at ESCUNI (http://www.escuni.es/) in Madrid during December 2017 and January 2018 with 72 teachers and education students. ESCUNI is a University Teacher Training Center (assigned to the Complutense University).
DESCRIPTION OF THE GAME
Conectado is a videogame developed within the research group e-UCM, specialized in eLearning and serious games. The videogame has been designed and developed with the objective of raising awareness against bullying and cyberbullying and is aimed at being a tool to help education professionals to educate on this subject in a more interactive way and with greater emotional involvement of young people from 12 to 17 years. The videogame is a graphic adventure where the player is placed in the situation of a person who suffers harassment in their day to day school. In this way, the player can experience these situations in first person, but in a safe way. It also allows you to experience firsthand some of the feelings of the victims of harassment, as well as to make players reflect on the consequences of their actions. In the game, students can make decisions in dialogues that affect the story of the game and its end.
The game aims to motivate a further discussion of aspects such as: bullying in schools and cyberbullying (both incidence of the problem and how to tackle it), advantages of videogames to raise awareness, what they learn associated with a memory, the importance of dealing with observers in bullying, avoiding passive observers and making observers act in favour of the victim.
DESCRIPTION OF THE EXPERIMENTS
The experiment aimed to validate the game with future teachers and show them how games can be used as an educational tool, in particular to raise awareness of a certain issue. Participants of the experiments played the game and completed a questionnaire about their opinion.
ESCUNI students testing the game Conectado.