Britney Kuoch, Isabella Abad, and Daniel Kim
June 2022
[Capstone: Isabella and Britney Slides and Daniel Slides]
Paper: B. Kuoch(*), R. Angotti, and K. Sung, “Lecture Board Game,” 15th Annual International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies (EduLearn 2023), To Appear in July 2023.
Our goal was to produce an application that makes virtual learning more engaging and interactive. The form of remote learning we’re familiar with utilizes video conferencing software like Zoom for lectures. To address some issues with online lectures, we created a board game application that can be used during a lecture.
For teachers, a problem with online lectures is that they can’t see participation since cameras are often off. Also faced with a lack of questions from students, teachers cannot get a good grasp on how well students understand the lecture. Teachers may ask for students to answer practice questions, but the teacher won’t be able to get answers from every student. For students, it’s easy to get distracted when your camera is off. Also, teachers often use lecture slides, which are provided to students. Having these slides make students less likely to write their own notes, which is bad because writing notes help students engage with and remember the material.
Our board game can engage students without being too distracting because we simplified the gameplay, reducing the attention required. Our application allows the teacher to post questions for students to answer. The teacher can see question data including how many students answered, how many got it right, and all student responses. The student can earn a dice and some stars when answering correctly. A dice can be rolled, allowing the student to move their player piece around the board, triggering tile effects and stealing stars by passing other players. After the teacher ends the game, the winner would be the student with the most stars. A csv report can be downloaded, allowing the teacher to keep a record on how the students did and the students to get notes they can study.
In this project, multiplayer networking was implemented using Augmented Space Library (ASL), developed by Cross Reality Collaboration Sandbox (CRCS). The development process was iterative. Every week, we had a standup, got feedback, and made adjustments. After each playtest, we made adjustments based on feedback. Through our application, we explored how to use a game for education. We used data and analysis to guide our thinking when maintaining the balance between lecture and game engagement.