Abstract:

The last decade has witnessed the emergence of ground-breaking computing paradigms and technologies such as Cloud Computing, Augmented and Virtual Reality, 2D/3D Games and Autonomic Computing amongst others. These technologies offer new opportunities for enhancing teaching and learning in Higher Education (HE), and enable individuals in academia to personalise the environment in which they work to meet their interests and needs. There is also evidence of a desire within students to be able to demonstrate these skills to improve their employability prospects. As such, these technologies have begun to influence the teaching and learning process in the HE sector.

However, there are numerous challenges facing academics wish to use these technologies, such as:
(i) how to utilise these technologies as educational tools in the teaching and learning process, and
(ii) how to teach these novel technologies for students as academic subjects.

This paper presents a novel way of teaching new computing paradigms as educational tools/subjects using game-based learning in a real life business context via a didactic mash-up approach. The proposed approach aims at bringing together the traditional “Teacher-centred” style along with the “Students-centred” one. It focuses on the practical-based learning using gamification in which, in each lesson, there are some instructions and objectives that students should achieve in the strategy game to qualify them to move to the next lesson. The scenario of the game used is revolved around real life business cases in order to understand the usefulness of these technologies in the real life.

The paper considers two modules that have been taught, in both Liverpool John Moores University in the UK and Université Lyon 1 in France, where the authors of this paper are based, using this approach. These modules are Cloud Computing and Augmented Reality. The paper also presents two case studies to demonstrate how the proposed approach can be applied and the impact on the teacher and students alike.

Keywords:

Gamification, Teacher centred, Student centred, Augmented Reality, Cloud computing.