Abstract
The goal of this paper is to utilize available big and open data sets to create content for a board and a digital game and implement an educational environment to improve students’ familiarity with concepts and relations in the data and, in the process, academic performance and engagement. To this end, we used Wikipedia data to generate content for a Monopoly clone called Geopoly and designed a game-based learning experiment. Our research examines whether this game had any impact on the students’ performance, which is related to identifying implied ranking and grouping mechanisms in the game, whether performance is correlated with interest and whether performance differs across genders. Student performance and knowledge about the relationships contained in the data improved significantly after playing the game, while the positive correlation between student interest and performance illustrated the relationship between them. This was also verified by a digital version of the game, evaluated by the students during the COVID-19 pandemic; initial results revealed that students found the game more attractive and rewarding than a traditional geography lesson.
Highlights
IntroductionThe abundance of online learning solutions both for children and adults has increased interest in taking advantage of the data they create
Ethics awareness becomes of the essence, since data mining, especially in social media, has been criticized as a channel which caters for targeted advertising and may promote dubious behavioral shifts; given that big data effectively expands the scope of educational measurement [6], it is important to educate young students about the underlying mechanics, the source of available big data and the means to collect meaningful and dependable data sets
We utilize a Game-Based Learning (GBL) approach to educate young students with respect to a specific school course, and about the relationships between different entities from a Big Data set; this is of great importance, in order to ensure that Big Data can be used and interpreted correctly [7,8,9]
Summary
The abundance of online learning solutions both for children and adults has increased interest in taking advantage of the data they create. The field of data analytics seems to be the most appropriate means to exploit them [1], mostly to predict student performance or interest [2], visualize information in a dashboard [3], either for school usage or for policy makers [4] or even to identify cognitive states in real-time, such as interest and fatigue [5] In this context, ethics awareness becomes of the essence, since data mining, especially in social media, has been criticized as a channel which caters for targeted advertising and may promote dubious behavioral shifts; given that big data effectively expands the scope of educational measurement [6], it is important to educate young students about the underlying mechanics, the source of available big data (not necessarily related to education) and the means to collect meaningful and dependable data sets. Today’s generation have the unique opportunity to go beyond traditional means of education [31], educators should use games to make learning fun and exciting and more effective
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