Serious Gaming: A New Way to Introduce Product Lifecycle Management

Abstract

Our research work deals with the development of new learning environments, and we are particularly interested in Games-based Learning. We have developed our own learning environment where we apply the metaphor of exploring a virtual 3D world, where each student embarks on a quest in order to collect knowledge related to a learning activity. In this article, we explain how this work has been applied to the industrial domain in order to “conduct the change”.Although the users appreciate this approach, there is an obvious need for information about learners’ skills, especially for the teacher. For that purpose, we have equipped the different tools belonging to the learning environment to allow tracing facilities. We can thus update the learners’ model when particular events occur, by using both data collected from traces resulting from the (collaborative) learning activity and information collected from the specific business tool integrated in the game.In this article, we first describe the Game-based learning environment that we have developed. We then focus on how to obtain general information contained in the user profile from basic user’s actions (traces). We give details and results on the experiment that we have set up to understand Product Lifecycle Management in such a learning environment. A real experiment has been made at our university in the PLM domain with the help of a company validating the feasibility of the approach.KeywordsGame Based LearningTrace observationIndicatorsProcess simulationPLMcollaborative activity