DIGITAL LIBRARY
DESIGNING A CLOUD PLATFORM FOR INTERACTIVE GAME ACTIVITIES IN WEB-BASED E-LEARNING
University Politehnica of Bucharest (ROMANIA)
About this paper:
Appears in: EDULEARN17 Proceedings
Publication year: 2017
Pages: 6797-6804
ISBN: 978-84-697-3777-4
ISSN: 2340-1117
doi: 10.21125/edulearn.2017.2561
Conference name: 9th International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies
Dates: 3-5 July, 2017
Location: Barcelona, Spain
Abstract:
Games are one of the most common activities among young people and for a good reason: they are fun, entertaining and usually challenging. Recent advancements in computer graphics allow for a fast creation of computer games with stunning visuals and advanced interaction in rapid development environments such as Unity or Unreal Engine 4 editors. Still, these technologies are requiring lots of technical knowledge like graphics programming, networking, 3D modelling or animation. For this reason, educational or serious games are not frequently developed and used in the e-learning process. Advanced applications are currently hard to build and publish, requiring serious investments of time, money and professional human resources.

This work describes a prototype system designed to help teachers to easily build, publish or integrate games or simulations into existing web-based Learning Management Systems. The applications can be developed using a simple drag and drop interactive editor that has a rich library of educational resources. The educator can start a project from templates like puzzles or 3D games and then use pre-made complex objects and interactions to design the game logic. The data is stored in a cloud platform and can be either published and directly accessed online in a web-browser or it can be integrated through an API into a web-based LMS for private or public multi-user classes.
Keywords:
e-learning, Serious Games, Cloud, LMS.