Multi-Devices Territoriality to Manage Collaborative Activities in a Learning Game
Résumé
Game Based Learning (GBL) has positive effect on learners' engagement. Students feel more concerned and invested when the learning scenario and gamified elements are motivating. Usually, GBL environments can improve individual activities, particularly by adapting them to the learners' current knowledge or can support collaborative learning in multi-player environments. In our research, we consider complex scenarios where both individual and collaborative learning are addressed. In order to support these scenarios, we take advantage of various devices, allowing new features. Personal devices (tablets, mobile phones) co-exist with shared devices (collaborative tabletops). New learning usages emerge in these multi-device environments where learners can swap from virtual to real activities. In this context, new problems appear when one wants to design new GBL activities. One major issue refers to the combination of personal and collective workspaces. This notion also known as "territoriality" has been addressed in the literature, particularly in Collaborative Tabletop Workspaces. However, we need to extend and reconsider this notion when designing multi-device activities. For instance, providing users with both private and shared devices raises confidentiality issues. In this work, we thus present three facets to consider for the design of GBL activities in this context. The first facet concerns the devices topology: the adjacency map, the notion of personal workspace on a collaborative device, and the representation of the area allowing information exchange between two devices. The second facet concerns the new actions to define: how to allow the users to provide others participants with information, to present partial information on objects to others, how to move an object from the collaborative workspace to personal workspaces and how to control shared workspaces through individual actions. The third facet concerns the contextual visualisation of the objects involved in the learning tasks. This contextual visualisation can for instance allow the privacy of several characteristics of an object. The object can be totally visible on the user's tablet, but may be hidden to the others in the collaborative workspace (e.g. one can see his/her game cards face-up on the tablet view while the same cards are face-down on the tabletop view). These three facets are then used to design the scenario of a collaborative game to learn French grammar. The scenario takes place in a newspaper office, where learners should edit short features about their university news. This writing exercise is prepared individually and then a collaborative edition happens. In this activity, personal and collaborative workspaces are used with different devices supporting the activities. The proposed approach is therefore particularly adapted to the context.