Teaching with Game Based Learning Management Systems : Exploring and observing a pedagogical dungeon

The work reported here takes place in the educational domain. We propose an approach based on a learning environment based on a graphical representation of a course: a pedagogical dungeon equipped with the capacity for collaboration in certain activities. The emergence of online multiplayer games led us to apply the following metaphor to these digital work environments: the way of acquiring knowledge during a learning session (a lesson) is similar to the exploration of a dungeon where each student collects knowledge related to a learning activity. In the first part, the paper focuses on the description of how concepts of learning activities can be represented in the dungeon view. In the second part, we deal with the support of the observation task for the teacher during a learning session and more generally with providing the users with awareness. We thus propose a multi-agent system using data collected from traces resulting from the collaborative learning activity. We then describe our game based application: the way the teacher creates a dungeon according to the general pedagogical goal of the session and the use of the dungeon from the student’s and the teacher’s point of view are described. Finally, this environment allowed us to set up experiments with students in our University. The feedback about these experiments is discussed at the end of the paper.