This interactive and participatory workshop provides a multiapproach experience of the field of serious games, user-centered design and stortytelling in Technology Enhanced Learning. The workshop is offered at the EC-TEL 2010 conference for the first time and its a combination of the work of 4 different institutions.
Learn about games from a theoretical point of view and experience user-centered design creating a low-fidelity prototype of an educational game. Through this 1-day workshop you will acquire theory, practice and hear about existing serious games, the application of storytelling and their integration in the learning flow.
Thinking about including the concept of games in TEL in your institution? Willing to hear from other experiences in the usage of storytelling? Have you heard of user-centered design? Do you want to know what it is and how it works? Attend the workshop on “User-centered interactive workshop: Storytelling and Educational Games in the Learning Flow” to learn about all these issues and to tell your story.
This workshop brings together different research teams and approaches around the topic of Storytelling and Serious Games.
It starts with a deep introduction into open burning issues in this area and continues with a hands-on participatory activity to
produce a game prototype starting from a given topic (taken from the e-VITA project). After lunch the approach taken by the
e-VITA team to design and develop 4 game prototypes will be presented and discussed with the participants and finally an
insight on how to integrate educational (serious) games into the learning flow is given.
9-11: Story-Telling and Educational Games (STEG)
Organizers: Yiwei Cao, Dominik Renzel, Stephan Lukosch and David Farrell
This session covers a range of research issues in story-telling and educational games including story and game
design paradigms, Web 2.0 based story-telling and gaming scenarios, advanced story-telling and educational
gaming technologies. It aims at a state-of-the-art discussion on advanced research and open issues on story-
telling and educational gaming among multimedia communities, with special focus on how both approaches can
be combined. This session will bring together researchers, experts and practitioners from the domains of non-
linear digital interactive story-telling and educational gaming to share ideas and knowledge. There is a great
amount of separate research in these two fields and the celebration of this workshop will allow the participants to
discover and leverage potential synergies. In this session, storytelling experiences will be passed to workshop
participants on a non-linear digital storytelling platform YouTell developed under the German Excellence
Research Cluster UMIC Virtual Campfire, and other advanced storytelling and educational game platforms.
11-13: UCDgame: User Centered Design of Technology Enhanced Learning Tools
Organizers: Muriel Garreta-Domingo, Enric Mor and Magí Almirall-Hill
Through a hands-on approach, the aim of this session is to provide a set of engaging stations where
participants can experience the different steps of a UCD process. It is designed as a game and
structured as a team and participatory activity with a set of interrelated tasks because the goal is not
only to show how each project phase is accomplished individually but also how the project is
completed and how these different phases relate to one another.
14-16: From Storytelling to Serious Games: Interactive workshop about methods and techniques with Demonstrations
from the “e-VITA” project
Organizers: Lucia Pannese, Dimitra Pappa, Sonia Hetzner and Aristidis Protopsaltis
This session is aimed at discussing methodological approaches and techniques that can be used to set up
Serious Games for creative learning. The basis for the discussion will be given by the e-VITA project, which is
characterized by a mix of Storytelling and Serious Games in a historical context. The workshop will be highly
interactive and a critical analysis of the adopted approaches will be carried out after a hands-on session with the
produced games prototypes.
16-18: Integration of Educational Games in the Learning Flow
Organizers: Baltasar Fernandez-Manjon, Iván Martínez-Ortiz and Javier Torrente
The aim of this session is to serve as an open forum for researchers, students, instructors and developers that
would like to share their experiences in practical applications of educational gaming. The session will especially
cover the identification of different open issues that should be addressed in order to facilitate the introduction of
games in the learning flow and the proposal feasible solutions. In this regard the active participation of the
audience will be encouraged. We will also take the chance to expose our vision of the field, which has been
translated into the <e-Adventure> educational game authoring tool. The main focuses of <e-Adventure> are the
reduction of the development costs of the games, the proposal of instructor-oriented features such as in-game
assessment and adaptation, and the integration of the games into the existing e-Learning infrastructure.
The workshops aims to provide its participants with the following elements:
- Bringing together researchers, experts and practitioners from the domains of non-linear digital interactive
story-telling and educational gaming to share ideas and knowledge.
- Make participants understand how a UCD process works and get the main UCD techniques and
methods.
- Provide the key elements of UCD in Technology Enhanced Learning.
- Critical analysis of the work carried out in the e-VITA project together with some useful feedback.
a deep insight into techniques and concrete activities to combine.
- Storytelling and Serious Games techniques, as well as knowledge sharing about best practices in this still very unexplored research field.
Who should attend the workshop?
Producers of Serious Games, Practitioners, Researchers and academics in the field of TEL, who can explain their methodological approaches to learning as well as their applications areas, experts and practitioners from the domains of non-linear digital interactive story-telling and educational gaming, as well as anyone interested in training and learning through innovative and interactive technologies are addressed and
invited to share their experiences, hopes and opinions.
Given the fact that Serious Games are a very promising upcoming area in Technology Enhanced Learning and that there is little evidence of their effectiveness as well as given the paucity of existing research linking pedagogic elements to both learning requirements and technical features, this “hands on workshop” should be of extreme interest to all working in this field.