BEACONING SOLUTION
Breaking the barriers to gamified learning by empowering educators to create their own playful lesson plans. Using narratives and minigames, learning contents are turned into an adventure.
Teacher dashboard
To author the gamified lesson plan, teachers will have their own dashboard that will allow them to manage their lessons and students, create new lesson plans and assign them to students. Educators can access the analytics related to the lessons that they created will have access to: Gamified lesson plan authoring; Mini-games authoring; Location based game authoring
Student dashboard
Students are able to access the lessons allocated to them from their own personal student dashboard. The experience through the gamified lesson plan (desktop or mobile) connects the context of what they have learned within the classroom into their own informal space.
Accessabar
Accessabar is a tool integrated in the Student UI and Teacher UI that makes the content accessible for students with disabilities.
Accessabar addresses cognitive, physical or visual disabilities and includes key facilities such as: Text to Speech, Speech Recognition, magnification, changeable font size and style, screen tinting, convert text to audio.
AUTHORING PIPELINE
Authoring Tool for
Gamified Lesson Path
The Authoring Tool for Gamified Lesson Paths (AT-GLP) is the interface that learning designers can use to create and gamify the lesson paths. The Authoring Tool for Gamified Lesson Paths (AT-GLP) is the core structure of the BEACONING system. The main objective of this component is to map the Lesson Paths to minigames, allowing teachers to configure gamified experiences for their students.
Authoring Tool for
Context Aware Challenge
The Authoring Tool for Context-aware Challenges (AT-CC) enables teachers, acting as learning designers, create pervasive experiences for students. The location-based component is integrated within the BEACONING ecosystem and facilitates learning processes outside of the classroom. The story is built around physical Points of Interests selected by the teacher.
Beacon Management Tool
The beacons defined in the Beacons Inventory can be reused for different purposes and for different activities or games.
By using beacons, teachers can create location based game where the GPS signal is not strong enough. Beacons can also be used outdoors when there is a need for higher precision than the one provided by GPS.
GAMEPLOT ENGINE
The Gameplot engine constitute the main day-to day interaction with the platform, for students and teachers. The Gameplot is modular, flexible and provides objects that are stored in a repository of gamified learning activities and learning activity design. The Gameplot can be easily customized to a variety of pedagogical objectives, contexts and narratives.
Metagames
Metagames are pervasive, game-driven experiences that blend context-aware challenges and minigames as motivational drivers for learning. The “Metagame” engine can launch minigames and/or location based activities, from the core services. The metagames can be customized to meet specific learning objectives and student needs.
Minigames
The Beaconing platform offers up to fifteen mini games, that can be used when creating a gamified lesson plan. Beaconing allows games to be designed into formal or informal education as part of the curriculum, classroom teaching or homework arrangement.
Gamified Lesson Paths
Gamified Lesson Paths constitute the core of the BEACONING Project and experience. The GPL embed learning in the daily life of the students, while providing deep engagement through their Game Plots overlaid over the pedagogical content. The specific aim of this deliverable is to describe how GLP relate to and are supported by the other components of the platform, respectively the Authoring Tool, the User Interfaces, the Game Plots, the Minigames, the Location Based Activities, and the Learning Analytics.
CORE SERVICES
BEACONING Core Services links all the components into a coherent ecosystem and provides central services for user management, single sign-on & session management, LMS integration, minigame registration, game plot registration, gamified lesson path storage, assignment and access management, as well as the distribution of analytics tracking codes to components in the gameplay flow. Service descriptions are provided using the OpenAPI standard, to facilitate integration with third parties.
Analytics
Learning Analytics Models (LAMs) allow data tracking for meaningful analysis and visualizations. LAMs allow Analytics to provide meaningful insights into student actions, helping the different stakeholders to understand how learning is taking place. While LAMs can be provided for each game or mini-game in the BEACONING platform to provide game-specific analysis, they can also be shared among minigames with similar analysis requirements.
BEACONING CONSORTIUM &
LARGE-SCALE IMPLEMENTATION PILOTS
