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

Abstract

Classcraft, available as a mobile and web application, is a role-playing game for class- room management in high schools [1]. Teachers can create teams and assign an avatar to students, as well as points and ‘powers’ as rewards for desired behaviour. By playing Classcraft, students are expected to help other students and to collaborate during school activities. Thus, Classcraft aims to foster players’ social engagement. We conducted a preliminary study on 6 classrooms from Switzerland. The objective of our study aims to characterize the social component of players’ engagement and its evolution. Our approach is based on the identification of engaged-behaviors [1]. Bouvier et al. [2] consider that players’ engagement encompasses four components. The environmen- tal component is in relation with the autonomy need, the social component is in relation with relatedness, the self component relates to the autonomy need and the action com- ponent is in relation with the competence and autonomy needs. We developed a methodology based on learning analytics [3] to monitor players’ behavior. The detection of engaged-behaviors is based on the collection and analysis of players’ digital traces of players’ actions. Each action is automatically recorded and characterized by a type of event, a timestamp (beginning and end of the event) and information that is useful to derive meaning. Among the wide variety of the action per- formed, some are inherent to players’ social engagement and they are analysed with a specific digital platform, called kernel Trace Based System for Learning Analytics (kTBS4LA), dedicated to the analysis of digital traces. Different categories of players emerged in terms of social engagement. In addition, the data collected shows that social engagement varies across time. This variation seems linked both to specific features of the game and to teachers’ decisions as game- master. This preliminary study also emphasizes some important methodological issues for addressing game-based learning with a methodology based on learning analytics.