Abstract:

Learning experiences are not typically used to describe formal learning activities, such as in classroom, transmissive methods. Centred in the student, this term describe that the learner is experiencing something that, hopefully, contributes to a change in thinking, understanding, or behaviour afterwards.

For this to happen, learning experiences should be active, meaningful, with social meaning, integrative, and diversified. We consider active learning experiences when the student has the main learning role. They should provide knowledge and skills that directly contribute to the learner’s ability to perform more effectively in the context of workplace learning. Sharing and cooperation is fundamental, allowing the learner to interact with other active learners. The inherent increase in complexity demands the integration of different dimensions of knowledge, better achieved through diversified strategies. In this context, teaching and learning is more than the mere acquisition of content. It represents a process of learning by thinking-do-thinking.

The learning experiences should be adequate to motivate the students and provide the necessary challenges for learning to take place. In this context, the concept is understood as a reinforcement of the goal of an educational interaction over its location (school, classroom) or format (course, program).

The diversity of ways in which students can learn from and interact with teachers, in addition to the level of independence they may have when learning, is considerable. In this paper, we propose to include not only traditional transmissive approaches and practical work assignments but also designing and playing games. The latter is regarded as an integral part of the students' knowledge building, with the objective of being instructional with the main focus on the cognitive side of instruction.

This approach is part of a broader pedagogical experience of applying gamification to a higher education subject in the course of computer science. It uses several game design mechanisms, such as adaptive challenges, rewards, curiosity and chance to increase the time students spend working, experiencing and learning. In addition to the award system that is being used to grade students the learning experiences are also designed using game design patterns. We focus mainly in the design, development and assessment of a tabletop Role-Playing Game, with the purpose of providing an environment for reflection and concept learning regarding data survivability.

The learning experience is evaluated through a specific Student Observation Record, evaluating the interaction between students, the dynamic of the learning experience and the overall learning degree.

Keywords:

Gamification, Higher Education, Educational Games, Tabletop Role-Playing Game.