Abstract:

Reducing violence in sports is an important issue that is certainly being taken seriously across Europe, and there are a large number of initiatives that have been launched in order to handle these problems. In this context, emerge the Save-it project, which has been co-funded by Eramus+ Programme of the European Union. This project allows to several groups of stakeholders with different backgrounds on sports, education or computer engineering, to collaborate in this experience whose main goal is to support innovative and educational approaches to reduce and prevent violence and tackle racism and intolerance in grassroots sports as football.

The main goal of the Save-it project is to design a learning methodology oriented to grassroots sports in order to reduce violence, racism and discrimination, by promoting the recognition of sports values and teaching them to the main target groups (kids, youngsters, coaches and parents). For this purpose, it has been designed two kind of learning materials; on the one hand, development of learning modules in order to promote and teach values education by coaches and parents; this material will be available through the learning platform Moodle and presented an interactive way. On the other hand, the development of a video game based on football sport that promote sports values using gamification techniques. The video game will be used by kids and young practitioners, and used by coaches as a resource to teach positive values. The innovative aspect of this project is based on the design of these new didactic materials to teach sport values, and new educational tools based on gamification, that will be used to reach through training activities

The main contribution of this work is to present our experience with gamification under the frame of the Save-it project. The first activity carried out in this project is focused on collecting and identifying those prevalent values in soccer players. To achieve this goal, it has been designed an online questionnaire destined to the coaches of several sport clubs. In this questionnaire, 12 coaches has evaluated a set of values extracted from the state of the art in sports. The results show 5 basic categories of values (Tolerance, Respect, Team Spirit, Personal Effort and Game Enjoyment), around which both learning courses and the video game have been designed.

Once the subset of values is selected, the coach will work over their players trying to promote the target values, to finally evaluate them during the training and matches. This can be understood as a simple positive support teaching strategy. Later, the coach evaluates the behaviour of each player for each evaluated value, this assessment will be translated into a set of ‘skill points’ in the video game such as: celerity, resistance, strength, defence and technique, to set up in his or her football team.

Our proposed gamification technique is designed in order to promote acquisition of sport values and display of behaviours based on that, through a reinforcement when they play the video game. The final paper will provide a complete description of selected sport values from coaches and professionals, and how they have been included in an online system that can be used by them to evaluate the youngsters. Finally, some technical details related to the implementation of our gamification technique will be described.

Keywords:

Gamification, Education, Sport values.