Abstract
Serious games often employ a scripted dialogue for player interaction with a virtual character. In our serious game Communicate, a domain expert develops a structured, scripted scenario as a sequence of potential interactions in an authoring tool. A player is often a student learning communication skills and a virtual character represents a person that a student talks to. In the original version of Communicate, a player ‘converses’ with a virtual character by clicking on one of the multiple statement options. Since 2018, we perform blended learning sessions for final year computer science students using Communicate. Our goal is to improve these sessions and in this paper, we apply the action research method over three semesters to iteratively improve these blended learning sessions. In the first semester, our baseline, we conduct sessions where students play a scenario in multiple choice format. In the second semester, we enhance Communicate by enabling a student to enter open text input in an improved scenario. In the third semester, we enhance a session by incorporating peer teaching. Students fill in an evaluation survey after a session and we compare the evaluation of students from the three semesters. Results show that student ratings are significantly higher in sessions incorporating peer teaching compared to the baseline.
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Acknowledgments
This activity has partially received funding from the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT). This body of the European Union receives support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. This research was also partially supported by the 644187 EC H2020 RAGE project.
This work has been developed in collaboration with the Software and Gameproject of the bachelor Computer Science in the faculty of Science, Utrecht University. The authors also acknowledge Majanne Wolters, Marjan van den Akker and Michiel Hulsbergen for their help in teaching and scenario improvement; and to Jordy van Dortmont and Marcell van Geest for implementing the desired changes to Communicate.
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Lala, R., Corbalan, G., Jeuring, J. (2019). Evaluation of Interventions in Blended Learning Using a Communication Skills Serious Game. In: Liapis, A., Yannakakis, G., Gentile, M., Ninaus, M. (eds) Games and Learning Alliance. GALA 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11899. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34350-7_31
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