Abstract:

In our paper we investigate and highlight how actual instances of playing an ITT mediated space mining game are collaboratively performed by the participants and thus lead to success.

In the context of an interdisciplinary project (social and educational sciences meet computer sciences) [1], we have designed the interactive tabletop mediated activity ‘Orbitia’ aiming at inducing collaborative conduct [2]. The storyline of the game is designed as an incentive for participants to work together as a space mining crew towards building up and sharing a common object. They are asked to find and mine valuable minerals to be transferred to a marked point on an imaginary planet. One of the challenging components of operationalizing this request consists of jointly steering a rover and detecting hidden minerals via a radar drone. Moreover, each participant occupies a so-called control station and takes on a specific role enhanced with customized but mutually supportive competences: damage controlling, energy controlling, mineral collecting. In the course of their missions, the crew members have to cope with several obstacles and constraints (fog, energy loss, hostile environment).

By relying on a relevant video excerpt (taken from a large video data corpus of the project), we will show how three participants build upon each other’s mutually complementary resources in order to successfully accomplish the challenging task of ‘seeing through the fog’. We can highlight how the participants expand their understanding of the above mentioned roles and assigned competences in a multimodal dialogue; and how this ‘new’ shared understanding launches next jointly accomplished successful actions.

Our paper aims at demonstrating how the design of our ITT mediated activity ‘Orbitia’ encourages the participants to combine their respective competences and to learn 'how to succeed together'.

References:
[1] Sunnen, P., Arend, B., & Maquil, V. (2018). ORBIT - Overcoming Breakdowns in Teams with Interactive Tabletops. In J., Kay & R., Luckin, Rethinking Learning in the Digital Age: Making the Learning Sciences Count, 13th International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS) 2018 (pp. 1459-1460). London, UK: International Society of the Learning Sciences. https://repository.isls.org/handle/1/678
[2] Roschelle, J., & Teasley, S. D. (1995). The construction of shared knowledge in collaborative problem solving. In C. E. O'Malley (Ed.), Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (pp.69-197). Berlin: Springer-Verlag. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-85098-1_

Keywords:

Interactive tabletop, gaming, learning how to collaborate.