Abstract:

In the last decade the rise of the Social Web promoted the appearance of many communities of interest where learners interested on specific topics share their knowledge in a very informal way. It is well known that exchanging of information with peers inside a community is very motivating for the learners. However, it is sometimes difficult to engage experts in these communities of interest as their offering of information is time demanding and not rewarding for them in many cases.

This paper takes as an example a community of interest related to Spanish archaeology. Most of its members are collectors, students of archaeology or people interested on history. However, it is still difficult to engage into this community to academics or archaeological dealers that are willing to share their expertise. This lack of expertise inside the community of interest hinders its members when acquiring some skills that typically entail mentoring processes. Some examples are the classification, authentication, dating or grading of archaeological items.

In this context we propose Numisdata, a game for accessing expert knowledge about Spanish archaeology. Its key idea is to exploit the coin descriptions contained in the database of an auction company for a quiz game. Thus, the members of the community of interest can compare the way they describe a coin with the way an expert previously described it, without the need of the expert to explicitly intervene in the comparison.

As a pilot study, we developed a section of Numisdata that contains a quiz game where Spanish coins from the XIX and XX centuries should be graded (i.e. determine how good the coin is preserved). The game was populated with 6577 coin descriptions. When a user accesses Numisdata the quiz shows a coin and offers a 10-point Likert scale that is commonly used to grade coins. The user can then bid a certain amount of points, getting twice as much if the grade he selects is the one introduced by the expert and loosing the points bet if it is not. Therefore, the user gets immediate feedback about his criteria in comparison to an expert.

This pilot study was made available on February 2016 (it can be accessed at http://www.numisdata.es ); by March 2016, 110 users had already registered, submitting a total amount of 14.262 coin grades. According to the interviews realized to several users, their intrinsic motivation for acquiring the expert knowledge is the main reason why they find the game useful, as well as their main motivation to play it.

Keywords:

Game-based learning, communities of interest, informal learning.