Abstract:

Today, we have been already strongly established our roots of our lifestyle into the rapidly growing digital era, where our everyday activities and habits are becoming more and more dependent on digital environment. As digital multimedia technology increasingly pervades people’s lives, including the lives of senior people, the need to provide relevant training of digital competences. Older seniors, not due to their frailty or age, often find it difficult to adapt them into the digital environment, because they often lack the basic digital literacy that is required to maintain their everyday life activities in this digitally transformed world. This is the major reason why they are facing with the sharp digital divide between them and the other population segments in the twenty-first century. The EU digital skills strategy and related policy initiatives have as main objective to enhance the digital competences of all citizens in order the digital transformation to be successful. In that context the senior people are considered as crucial learners, for obtaining the knowledge of digital competences. The seniors are learners who have to be treated patiently and gently. In the paper, we are presenting the results of an innovative Game-Based Assessment (GBA) approach using the blended learning and gamification with both analog and digital challenges with an aim to motivate seniors people to test their knowledge, skills and attitudes. The goal is to facilitate the further digital skills learning after the level of the current understanding of the digital services is assessed. GBA is a type of evaluation in which users (i.e. job candidates, senior people, trainees) takes a part in gaming as players without being frustrated in an evaluation of their current digital knowledge. GBA is a method that motivate, engage, and enhance user experience through game-designed elements more attractively and effectively than traditional methods and without any frustration for the players that through the game display their level of knowledge. Within the on-going European Project from Erasmus+ DIGIBLEND | “Improving adult digital literacy through innovative gamified blended learning”, we developed a new GBA game called “INFINITY” where players – mainly seniors participate in »monopoly-a-like« gameplay in order to show their knowledge and make progress by upgrading their skills and understanding of the digital world. The game “INFINITY” is used as a assessment tool to ensure the understanding of the digital skills and knowledge based on an offer of the services being part of the digital environment such as: internet safety, data literacy, and problem solving in use of digital services. The “INFINITY” game has been evaluated by testing 45 seniors in the three Elderly Home Centres in Slovenia. Each testing session was carried out with 15 seniors’ players. The playing of the “INFINITY” game was performed with a mentor that had the role of a »game master«. After each session, there was a questionnaire provided to the participants that were asked to fill the answers, and a short interview was done as well as by the “game master”. The feedback of the game was positive with minor comments and complaints, but the tested skills of the seniors were improved after repeating the game play.

Keywords:

Digital Competences, Digital Literacy, Game-based assessment, Digital divide, Erazmus+, Senior People, Gamification.