Abstract:

In the last year, due to the circumstances in which we find ourselves since the emergence of the COVID19, information and communication technologies (ICT) have entered intensely at all education levels. The interest for 100% online learning has increased together with this for gamification techniques (Kapp 2012) or development of serious games (Gil Quintana and Prieto Jurado 2019; Gómez Contreras 2020; Prieto Andreu 2020: Romero and Turpo 2015) in order to encourage motivation in online students. The use of technologies (Pilgrim, Bledsoe and Reily 2012), collaborative tools (González 2005; Solano and Gutiérrez 2006), content design and creation tools (Berenguer and Molina 2016) are trend to transform the traditional into a virtual classroom. Research in Technologies Applied to Knowledge (TAK), as a result of the application of ICT in education (Lozano 2011), has a strong presence in European and national research programmes and more and more research groups and companies are working in this area (http://www.edutec.es/content/grupos-investigacion).

As with the rest of the educational levels in Spain, Education and Communication technologies are integrated in the curriculum of Early Childhood and Primary Education of the Community of Madrid (Governing Council Decree 17/2008, 6 March). For this reason, teachers should understand their multiple uses and forms, to integrate them into the classroom in an appropriate and productive way. The innovation work presented herein, proposes the integration of technologies in the stage of Early Childhood Education through the gamification of an annual project in the class of 5 years. A graphic adventure is designed to complement the work in the classroom, throughout the course, to reinforce the contents and work at the same time, English language.

According to Albán Taipe et al. (2017) the most obvious problems in the process of designing and developing serious games (SG) are related to the lack of a methodology that links the game to educational content and pedagogical aspects. In this work, special attention is therefore paid to the analysis and design phases of the game, which have to do respectively with the identification of the game characteristics to meet the needs in its educational context and with the definition of the relationships between the educational content and the parts of the game. It also presents some key aspects of the development phase of the SG based on the benefit of the collaboration of the teacher or learning facilitator with more technological profiles in interdisciplinary groups in this third phase. "Moon the alien" is developed in Unity and proposes the story of an alien who accidentally arrives on Earth and his/her adventures to return to her planet. To achieve this, she will have to pass a series of missions that hide quite a lot of academic content and challenges, mini-games of a more playful type, organized according to the course teaching plan. Both the adventure-filled story and the gamification elements, such as prizes and points, will act as motivating elements for users to be interested in continuing to play. This project highlights the relevance of applying a methodology suitable for the initial stages of the development of a game as the main predictor of the game success and also incorporates the first steps of the development stage to evaluate the degree of difficulty that the design and development of a Serious Game involves.

Keywords:

Serious Games (SG), Early Childhood Education, Mobile devices, Unity, design methodology.