THE SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH GAME: MOODLE AS A GAME BASED PLATFORM AND A SOCIAL COMMUNITY SYSTEM

‘Research Game – The European scientific research game’ is a Lifelong Learning Programme – Comenius (Project N°. 527547-LLP-1-2012-1-IT-COMENIUS-CMP) aiming at developing a new teaching approach and pedagogical strategy to learn a methodology useful in all the subjects of the scientific research, and also realize and apply creative and innovative thinking. In order to do so the project chose to use two strategies: learning-by-doing (or situated learning) and game – based learning, a European wide competition played through a specific serious game. This work describes the innovative use of information and communication technologies to make the discipline more appealing and engaging for students of new generations on the topic of biodiversity and ecology.

As the project is set as a two phases competition, one offline, asking students and teachers to collaborate internationally across Europe in applying the scientific method to a topic of research of the domain of Biodiversity and Ecology; and the other online, involving participants in competing on a serious game. For this reason, we thought to use Moodle (https://moodle.org/) in two ways: as a game based platform and as a social community.
Usually Moodle is used as an e-learning platform, where teachers and students can create different online courses in the traditional e-learning way, connecting to the system only to follow a class or download materials. In this case we decided to make an innovative use of Moodle, rethinking it as a game based platform system. The classical Moodle structure has been replaced by a team structure, where each teacher (mentor according to the Research Game terminology) can create his/her own team of students. Moodle’s interaction with the game has been enhanced in a way to permit an immediate recognition of participants’ commitment in the project and their achievements.

The second aspect redesigns Moodle as a Social Community System, able to connect phase one and phase two of the project, and to create a link between the offline and online activities of the participants, providing a place to show their progresses in the creation of the research project, publishing and sharing the results of their researches, evaluating them through a facebook-like system. Furthermore, Moodle has acted also as link among the different online activities, as participants used the platform as a way to compare and contrast their approaches to the project, interact on the topic of ecology and biodiversity sharing relevant information and materials (in particular didactic pictures), and, in few words, creating a thematic expert community working through the online interaction and used by all those teachers and students interested in sciences and biodiversity involved in our project.

Currently, the project is still open and running, and is approaching the end of Phase 1 (the submission of the reports of teams’ Research Projects) and will soon lead to the final European online competition set on 29 April 2014. So far we count about 210 students, 40 teachers and 64 teams from 34 schools based in 8 different countries.