Prof Dr Sylvester Arnab | Coventry University
Educators as game designers: Seriously?
The engaging characteristics of games are increasingly leveraged in education. Games, which are more readily blended with existing educational techniques, are more likely to be accepted by educators as useful resources. This talk explores the importance of the sense of ownership and autonomy, suggesting that educators should be empowered to create or co-create their own games. Drawing from the practice of the award-winning GameChangers initiative (GChangers.org) , the talk reflects on the insights into how the barriers to the process of innovating the way we teach and learn can be removed through empathic approaches.

Prof Dr Jan L. Plass | New York University
Five Designs to Make Games More Effective for Learning
This presentation will introduce a design model for playful learning that incorporates a range of design foundations that can be used to achieve different types of engagement in games. Applying this model, we will discuss how design features of games can be used to enhance learning outcomes. Examples of these features include Learning Mechanics, Assessment Mechanics, Emotional Design, Adaptivity, and Level Design, for which we will show practical examples and discuss related research.

Presenters in alphabetical order of their firstname
A

Aurélie Gimbert & Mario Horvat | Campus des métiers, CREATIV
Cité Apprenti(e)
The project “Cité Apprenti(e)” is the result of a national French call to propose something new and innovative to prepare young people (below 30) to start an apprenticeship contract.
The main objectives of the project are to propose a three weeks trainee:
To discover jobs and trainees (mainly with a strong customer relationship dimension -example hotel and catering) in order to build a career guidance project;
To work on self-confidence of the learner;
To work with the learners on their soft skills;
To develop and test game-based pedagogical tools to motivate dropout students. 

Anna Seidel | Brandenburgische Technische Universität Cottbus
Re:construction – A Motivating and Successful Start into Studying Engineering
In Germany, less and less students enrol in engineering courses every year despite the growing demand for future engineers. The few students who do get enrolled often struggle with the abstract learning content, different teaching styles and knowledge gaps through the first semesters. The serious game Re:construction aims to show engineering in a playful, accessible and applied way. With its unique combination of game and learning mechanics, it seeks to fill common knowledge gaps and support learners in their choice of study and transition to higher education.

C

Cornelia Schade | Technical University Dresden
From a knowledge object to an adaptive learning path - How to develop an adaptive serious game for health
The aim of this presentation is to show the approach of how to develop the adaptive serious game called "E.F.A." which is directed to employees, especially leading staff, being responsible for workplace health and safety. First of all, the game itself with its gamification elements, its learning contents and its application scenarios will briefly be explained. Moreover, challenges in how to conceptualize different learning path that are adaptively responsive to the player's learning behavior are addressed. The presentation gives and insight into a specific approach on how to develop the underlying model for the game’s adaptivity and how to design tailored learning tasks for different levels of player performance.

Corinna Lehmann & Helena Gottschalk | Technical University Dresden
Know Your Types: The important connection of player types and learning styles in the development of game-based learning settings.
As game based learning is the term for the fusion of learning and game worlds, gamification is used to describe the use of single game elements in educational contexts. This includes game mechanics and strategies that can determine the learning path, motivation and goal. But which element needs to be used for which player type? How can these player types be related to learning styles? As the connection between these two worlds is quite complexe, this presentation focuses on how they influence each other and how the hidden potential can be unlocked by educators.

H

Helge Fischer | Fachhochschule Dresden
Gamification in Business
This presentation focuses on the opportunities and risks of corporate gamification and discusses the concept of playful business. The essential characteristics of play and its connections to New Work are shown, and then the fundamental, empirically derived characteristics of playful organizations are presented.

J

Josefin Müller | Fachhochschule Dresden
GATE:VET App & Wiki
The Erasmus+ funded Project GATE:VET project aims to support teachers at vocational schools in expanding their methodological repertoire. We want to show VET teachers how they can enrich their classes – from introducing basic gamified learning activities into everyday practice to developing elaborate serious games. The main outcomes of the project are a wiki and a mobile phone app, which will be introduced in this presentation.

M

Manuel Ninaus | Universität Innsbruck
Emotional Engagement in Game-Based Learning
Emotional processes are inseparable from cognitive processes. Accordingly, emotions can have a substantial impact on the learning process. Game-based learning is considered to be particularly well suited to increase emotional engagement of learners. In my talk, I will address how game-based learning fosters emotional processing and how it might facilitate learning processes.

Maria Storm-Holm | VUC Storstrøm  &  Thomas Kunze | Games Institute Austria
A Gamified School
Learning design at VUC Storstrøm is the fusion of IT- didactics and pedagogical practices – we no longer separate the two. It combines the knowledge of learning processes and use of a multimodality with a focus on creating student learning activities. The teacher – as a learning designer – creates open and innovative learning paths for the student, which in turn makes the students the creator of their own learning process and brings together our three strands of values: Professional competence, digital competence, and relational competence. The only constant is “change” which means constant teacher development.
At VUC, we try to incorporate game-based learning and game-based teaching as a natural part of the learning designs and the teaching. To motivate and inspire the students attending school and to help them succeed with their education we bring both analogue and digital games to the teaching e.g., E-sport, VR and Active Floor.
We will introduce the project ‘‘Games for Basic Skills Teaching’’ and the Wiki game.

Marius Brade | Fachhochschule Dresden
How to use Game Design for Teaching to be a successful Software Engineer
TBC

Matthias Heinz | Technical University Dresden
Gamification’s Dark Side Horizon
There are many studies on gamification, but most of them only focus on the evaluation of individual projects and their positive results. How gamification is used also depends on the risks and side effects associated with its use. Therefore, it is necessary not to ignore the so-called Dark Side of Gamification. The presentation sensitises gamification stakeholders with an overview of possible risks and side effects so that they shape the way gamification is used – on the bright side.

P

Panagiotis Petridis | Aston University
A serious game for stimulating energy efficient behaviours
The significance of using games for educational purposes is well documented in the literature. It has been argued that serious games can draw more engagement and user attention to topics when compared to conventional web or print media, including concepts around energy education. The smarter household project has deployed an energy indoor health monitoring system in 19 UK social housing units, utilising internet technologies to connect the end-user through tablet devices to multiple interventions (dashboard visualization, application of gamification, and serious game). The serious game aimed to help residents understand their energy consumption whilst stimulating energy efficient behaviours towards managing indoor conditions via in-game decisions. This paper presents our preliminary findings relating to the serious game as an intervention across the 19 households. The game demonstrates potential value to trial participant in terms of how to apply the lessons learned from the in-game scenarios to their everyday activities.

Petros Lameras | Coventry University
Endowing a Game-Based Learning Hub for Augmenting Teaching and Learning: Design, Constellations and Perceptions from a Teacher’s Perspective
Game-based learning is viewed as an immersive and pedagogically rich approach to enhancing teaching and learning in schools. However, teachers may feel overwhelmed from the dispersed, disorganised and invalidated plethora of game-based resources circulated over the Web that needs to be collected, reviewed and repurposed for designing and orchestrating game-based learning. This paper presents the design requirements of a game-based learning platform that may help teachers to find, retrieve, re-use and share game-based learning along with opportunities of augmenting teachers’ creative potential and professional development. The paper also contemplates on qualitative findings of a small-scale study (n=18) on teachers’ different perceptions of game-based learning and constellations of employing a digital platform for increasing awareness and practice in the classroom. An empirically-based framework is developed that maps perceptions to actual practice. The findings may contribute to developing discourse on processes, practices and strategies that teachers would employ, which in turn would inform the design of GBL systems dedicated to support teachers in their effort to use game-based learning most relevant to them.

S

Salomé Picard | Paris School of Business BE YOU - Building Entrepreneurial Mindset in Youth for a Sustainable Society
BE YOU (Erasmus+ project) brings together 5 partners from France and Italy and a wide network of associated partners to raise young people's awareness on climate change issues and empower them to become actors of change in their local communities through Social Entrepreneurship. To this end, the project plans to develop, pilot and disseminate three innovative workshops for young people. Moreover, we will build a set of open-source educational resources about social entrepreneurship, which will be freely available online and can be used directly by young people, teachers, facilitators, and educators who want to use them with young people they supervise.

Stéphanie Philippe | Manzalab
VR and Games: a powerful combination for learning?
Games are widely used for education and training; this approach is supported by wide research works and empirical observations. Immersive technologies, such as Virtual Reality are expected to extend the possibilities of games by simulation and to enhance their efficiency through engagement. Several questions are however raised, including potential side effects on the user (e.g. visual fatigue) and loss of focus due to the complexity of the interface, which could negatively impact the learning outcome. We will provide insights on these rapidly evolving questions.

Steve Nebel | Technical University Chemnitz
Encouraging collaboration with educational videogames
Our experiment seeks to implement the ‘‘jigsaw strategy’’ within educational videogames. The results show increased play performance, and learning outcomes with increased task interdependence. We conducted mediator and moderator analysis, which revealed a strong impact of play performance on learning outcomes. Additional analyses of mental effort, cognitive load, and efficiency allowed for deep insights into the playing and learning process. These insights enrich current theories about collaboration, mental strain, and the working memory effect and highlight the applicability of collaborative mechanics within educational videogames.

T

Theresia Zimmerman | Technical University Dresden
Narration Design in Educational Games
Telling stories has always been a fundamental part of human culture. Since all stories are told with the intention to convey a specific message to the recipient, it can be concluded that stories have a “didactic nature” (Schank & Berman, 2002, S. 288). Narration in educational games can help to see issues from different perspectives and enable knowledge transfer and situated learning. This presentation will highlight different approaches to narrative design in educational games.
Schank, R. C., & Berman, T. R. (2002). The pervasive role of stories in knowledge and action. In: Green, M.C., Strange, J.J., Brock, T.C. (Eds.) Narrative impact: Social and cognitive foundations (pp. 287–313). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers.

V

Vincent Schiller | Fachhochschule Dresden
ENC#YPTED: An Educational Game for Programming in the Unity Engine
ENC#YPED immerses the learner in a game world aiming to support a positive learning experience in the acquisition of programming skills. The application was iteratively improved through user experience testing. Gameplay duration and difficulty were irrelevant for test subjects to achieve their goals. Considering their high level of motivation, a flow experience can be assumed. The game includes three levels and is planned to be expanded as an OER in the future. This workshop aims at playing ENC#YPTED and identifying its suitability for learning fields in VET as well as possible new levels for future use.

Y

Yann Tambelini | CREASUP  &  Stéphanie Philippe | Manzalab
A mobile game as support for digital design students
CREASUP DIGITAL has been recently launched to train future digital design professionals. Its uniqueness: focus on professional competencies and knowledge. No books, no notebooks: every evening the students are invited to complete new activities in a mobile app to consolidate the theoretical learnings of the day. The app offers a set of various training activities: mini games, articles, videos, quiz, flash cards. These are designed by the trainers according to the pedagogic objectives with the training content broken down in small elements. Trainees are encouraged to complete the activities to collect badges and progress in the leader boards.