Experiments have been recently conducted at IES Manuel de Falla in Puerto Real, Cádiz, Spain with more than 300 students and 11 teachers testing the serious game Conectado. The first day, teachers were trained with the game; and then 21 sessions were conducted with +300 students during two more days.
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 aim of the experiment was to validate the video game Conectado as an educational tool to increase awareness about the problem of bullying and cyberbullying. In the experiments, players have to complete a previous questionnaire about their perception of certain bullying and cyberbullying situations, play a full game of the Connected game, and finally complete a later questionnaire with the same questions as the initial one, in order to compare their awareness before and after playing the game, as well as questions about their playing experience. The session was completed with a reflection on bullying, cyberbullying and the use of serious games in schools as tools to raise awareness, educate and teach.
The first experiment with teachers aimed to validate the game Conectado and show them how games can be used as an educational tool, in particular to raise awareness of a certain issue. Feedback from teachers was collected in questionnaires after they have played the game. Also, teachers were presented with the teacher dashboard for the BEACONING Analytics System while students were playing and feedback was collected from them.
Students (left) and teachers (right) from IES Manuel de Falla in Puerto Real, Cádiz, Spain, playing the serious game Conectado.