Abstract:

Group work is a proven strategy for acquiring knowledge and teaches methodological and social competence to students. In a classical digital teaching environment (ie video conference) this doesn’t work well though. Students are often less engaged in video conferences and it is
often difficult to manage break-out rooms effectively.

To remedy this we used an isometric 3d environment for digital teaching, where each person involved is represented by an avatar. Participants can move freely in third person perspective through the provided environments. Video and audio activate in the vicinity of each other or in defined rooms for group work. We used www.gather.town as an application for this serious gaming scenario.

Our participating students (approximately 100) were from two German universities with different fields of study. The classes we gave were also from different fields, respective social and computer sciences. We provided group work tasks specific to each class that were designed in a flipped classroom manner. In one of the biggest tasks the students had to create a poster and present it.

To measure the perceived utility of our method we provided questionnaires to our students. We conducted a survey in the start of semester to determine the opinion regarding digital group work. At the end of the semester we conducted a second one to accordingly record their response to our methodology.

Results showed an overall good acceptance of the serious gaming environment. Albeit the return rate to our last survey was only at roughly 35 %. However, preparation of the virtual classrooms is challenging and time consuming for the teacher.

Our work shows the feasibility of a serious gaming approach in digital group work and the advantage over classical video conferences.

Keywords:

Serious Games, virtual teaching, e-learning, distance Learning.