The 13th edition of the International Conference on Interactive Mobile Communication, Technologies and Learning took place in Thessaloniki, Greece, on the 31st October and 1 November. IMCL2019 is part of an international initiative to promote technology-enhanced learning and online engineering world-wide. The theme was "Internet of Things, Infrastructures and Mobile Applications".
Petros Lameras, from Coventry University joined and presented the the main results of STEAM project: "A Serious Game for Amplifying Awareness on Multimodal Teaching: Game Design and Usability Study".
STEAM is a serious game developed as a medium for helping teachers to experience multimodality for teaching and learning. A design-based paradigm is adopted to elucidate how in-game design elements coupled with learning may visualize in-game multimodal representations. Multimodality is experienced as a process of creating meaning though connecting and combining different modes, semiotic resources and semiotic ensembles. In this paper, we present the design and usability evaluation of the game. The usability study was conducted with (n=32) school teachers completing an online survey after playtesting the game for identifying, capturing and fine-tuning in-game usability aspects. The findings indicated that the game’s core mechanics, the in-game dialogues and card-game, represent and visualise the content and process of multimodal in-game ensembles whilst the development of in-game feedback and progress indicators was perceived as having the capacity to guide understandings on in-game multimodality and to track in-game progress.
Keywords: serious games, multimodality, teaching, usability, game design
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