Social Engagement in a Digital Role-Playing Game dedicated to Classroom Management

Abstract

Classcraft is a role-playing game for classroom management in high schools. Teachers can create teams and assign an avatar to students, as well as points and ‘powers’ as rewards for desired behaviour. Classcraft aims to foster players’ social engagement. We conducted a preliminary study on classrooms from Switzerland. The objective aims to characterize the social component of players’ engagement. Our approach is based on the identification of engaged-behaviors. Bouvier et al. consider that players’ engagement encompasses four components (environmental, social, self-component and action). We developed a methodology based on learning analytics to monitor players’ behavior. The detection of socially engaged-behaviors is based on the collection and analysis of players’ digital traces’ actions with the tool kTBS4LA. Different categories of players emerged in terms of social engagement. The data collected shows that social engagement varies across time, classroom or gender. This variation seems linked both to specific features of the game.