Abstract:

Technology enhanced learning is lately considered as an innovative educational procedure which derives from the use of digital games with pedagogical value in the school classes. In the recent years, the use of Serious Games for learning of History and Culture is widespread. Serious Games is a group of digital games that aim at learning in an entertaining way.
Year 2014 has been announced Dominikos Thetokopoulos year by UNESCO, in the memory of 400 years of the famous painter’s death. In this context, relative activities took place in many schools of secondary education. In this framework, an educational digital game was implemented and tested in schools of secondary education, based on the learning theories of constructivism of Piaget and social constructivism of Vygotsky. The students involved were able to take a tour to the artwork of the famous artist and construct relevant knowledge through experimental learning.

The purpose of the current work was the design and development of a Serious Game which applies the aforementioned ideas. More specifically:

1. The “El Greco’s Life and Artwork” game was designed by students for students with the guidance of professional educators. The implementation of the game supports both standalone and multiplayer experience to the students.
1.1. The standalone game “El Greco’s Life and Artwork” game is an interactive s/w and mobile application where students are able to learn cultural facts during an entertainment process. It was developed in Java programming language and used SQLLite as database and Swing Library for the graphical user interface. The selection of the Java programming language was based on the fact that the software should be executed in cross-platform environments.
1.2. The Multiplayer Web and Mobile game aims at increasing the motivation for playing the game by adding the feature of competition between students. Therefore, a multi-player game was implemented which extends the standalone version. The extended version adapted a server-client version where the two major components (server and client) interoperate through the internet. Furthermore, a web-based client and a mobile application was used as clients in order to allow students to interact with the game through various devices.
2. The graphical environment of the tableau of the game, for the interaction with the users-players, was designed in cooperation with the teachers and students that participated in the project.
3. The rules of the game were specified from the teachers and students that participated in the project, as well.
4. The back-end of the application was implemented and allows us to make easy changes of the rules and especially of the queries that the students should respond to.
5. The experimental (pilot) usage of the application was made by the students that participated in the project and by students from other schools.
6. The participants were evaluated, via a specific designed questionnaire.

The evaluation of the responses to the questionnaire coincides with the results found in other similar works. Indeed, the use of Serious Digital Games in cultural education supports better learning and enforce their motivation to learn more about a specific subject. The reported results of the answers, have been processed with an innovative benchmarking information system which offers tools for distributed data acquisition and automated analysis and the conclusions are very positive for the learning impact of the game.

Keywords:

Serious Games, social constructivism, El Greco, digital educational game / software, web and mobile educational games, benchmarking evaluation.