Games4Learning: How to integrate serious games to personalized learning itineraries?

Abstract

Good teaching practices and correct learning procedures of the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) disciplines are essential factors in the motivation and training of professionals in society at the moment. The predicted rise in the demand for STEM professionals in the work market in the next ten years is greater than that predicted for other sectors. Numerous initiatives exist that focus on educational innovations in order to enhance the skills and knowledge of the pupils in the STEM disciplines during their educational life. One of these innovations is the utilization of personalised learning itineraries guided by game-based learning. Intrinsically, the games stimulate motivation and competitiveness between the students. They are socially inclusive and they can be easily adapted to different progress and knowledge levels. Creating games helps in the design of personalized itineraries that allow for the detection of characteristics, skills and/or the drawbacks of each student, making it possible to analyse student progress. Even though, currently, games dedicated to STEM teaching exist, their quality is not sufficient to cover the needs of young students and few of them allow for the creation of itineraries. Moreover, the educator is not able to adapt the existing games to the curricular content without having programming knowledge. This paper focuses on the research of the technological challenge to define and to build a platform to allow for the creation of learning itineraries based on games and oriented to the educational pre-university stages. This platform will be able to create and adapt these itineraries as well as being able to build specific games for the students, making the analysis of their competences and their curricular evaluations easier. The novelty of this proposal lies in the possibility of interactively creating learning itineraries based on games. This platform will help teachers to detect the characteristics, skills and/or drawbacks of each pupil as well as enabling them to build personalized games even if they don't have programming skills. In addition, this platform will provide the tools to increase the student's motivation. Finally, it will integrate the family into the educational process, making the child's needs in the home-study sessions more understandable.