Elsevier

Computers & Education

Volume 57, Issue 1, August 2011, Pages 1389-1415
Computers & Education

An alternate reality game for language learning: ARGuing for multilingual motivation

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2011.01.009Get rights and content

Abstract

Over the last decade, Alternate Reality Games (ARGs), a form of narrative often involving multiple media and gaming elements to tell a story that might be affected by participants’ actions, have been used in the marketing and promotion of a number of entertainment related products such as films, computer games and music. This paper discusses the design, development and evaluation of an ARG aimed at increasing the motivations of secondary school level students across Europe in the learning of modern foreign languages. The ARG was developed and implemented as part of a European Commission Comenius project and involved 6 project partners, 328 secondary school students and 95 language teachers from 17 European countries. The collaborative nature of ARGs provides a potentially useful vehicle for developing collaborative activities within an educational context. This paper describes the educational value of ARGs, in particular the ARG for supporting the teaching of modern European languages and the specific activities that were developed around Web 2.0 and gaming that underpinned the ARG and helped promote cooperation and learning within an educational environment. An evaluation of the ARG was conducted using an experimental design of pre-test → ARG intervention → post-test. 105 students completed the pre-test, 92 students completed the post-test and 45 students completed both the pre-test and post-test questionnaires. In general, student attitudes towards the ARG were very positive with evidence suggesting that the ARG managed to deliver the motivational experience expected by the students. The majority of students who completed the post-test either agreed or strongly agreed that they would be willing to play the game over a prolonged period of time as part of a foreign language course. In addition, through using the ARG, students believed that they obtained skills relating to cooperation, collaboration and teamwork.

Introduction

Serious games and games-based learning have made progressively significant contributions in helping to promote enhanced learning experiences within education in recent years. According to Connolly, Stansfield, and Hainey (2007) games-based learning can be defined as the use of computer games-based technology approach to deliver, support, and enhance teaching, learning, assessment and evaluation. Prensky (2001) argued that learning was unengaging as compared to media such as computer games and that younger generation ‘digital natives’ have grown up in a technologically sophisticated environment which has led to changes in their attitudes and expectations which has created fundamental differences with the pre-digital generation of ‘digital immigrants’ which include many of today’s educators. According to Shaffer, Squire, Halverson, and Gee (2004) computer games “bring together ways of knowing, ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of caring: the situated understandings, effective social practices, powerful identities, and shared values that make someone an expert”. Gee (2003) identified 36 different learning principles as to why games are good for learning which include: identity (how a game captures and immerses a player); interaction (appropriate feedback providing additional problems based on player decisions); production (players seeing the consequences of decisions they make); risk taking (allowing a player to experience a minimal of real world consequences or no consequences at all); customisation (players being allowed to customise their own desired attributes providing a sense of ownership over what they are doing). O’Neil, Wainess and Baker (2005) highlighted the perceived instructional usefulness and benefits of computer games as providing complex and diverse approaches to learning processes and outcomes, interactivity, the ability to address cognitive as well as affective learning issues, and what they regard as most importantly that of motivation for learning.

With the increased adoption and use of Web 2.0 or social software applications within the classroom environment, there have been increased opportunities to use technology in a much more collaborative and participatory manner in promoting enhanced information access, sharing of ideas, information and knowledge exchange and content production (McLoughlin & Lee, 2008). This paper explores the use of one such technology – an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) that involves multiple media, interactive narrative among participants, and story telling and gameplay that is affected and influenced by the actions and ideas of the ARG participants. Although ARGs have previously been development and implemented as promotional and marketing tools for entertainment related products, ARGs can provide a useful educational context and platform through their collaborative nature and opportunities for students to explore ideas and views with each other, search for relevant information and engage in problem-solving tasks related to learning modern languages. The ARG project was part of a European Commission Comenius project that ran from 2007 to 2009 entitled ‘ARGuing for Multilingual Motivation in Web 2.0’ and comprised 6 European partners, with 328 14–16 year old students and 95 language teachers participating in the study from 17 European countries. The ARG itself was developed through adapting the open-source Learning Management System, Moodle, into a multilingual gaming environment. This paper explores the design, development, implementation and evaluation of the ARG, highlighting its potential value within the context of modern language learning.

In the next section, we discuss the use of games within language learning and, in particular, discuss the use of ARGs both as a marketing tool and as an educational tool. In the section thereafter, we examine the design of an ARG for language learning and the design of the Tower of Babel ARG that we have produced. We then provide an evaluation of the Tower of Babel ARG and future directions.

Section snippets

Games and language learning

As noted by Crookall (2007), language teachers make great use of simulation/gaming methodologies and there are many supporting textbooks and research papers that present various forms of role-play, games, simulations, and other exercises (e.g. Garcia-Carbonell et al., 2001, Gaudart, 1999, Halleck, 2007). While many of the simulations/games used are non-computer based, during recent years the computer game has become an important development in popular culture. There have been a number of

The design of an ARG for language learning

The ARGuing for Multilingual Motivation in Web 2.0 project was an EU Comenius project that ran from 2007 to 2009 and investigated the use of ARGs in motivating secondary school students to learn a modern foreign language. ARGuing was a cutting-edge project that addresses two fundamental needs in European education in an innovative manner. Firstly, how to bridge the widening technological gap between educators and their students and, secondly, how to motivate students to understand the benefits

The evaluation of the Tower of Babel ARG

As highlighted previously, the issue of evaluation was an important one for the ARG project team due to the fact that there is a lack of empirical studies analysing the usage of such applications as well as general models of evaluation (Connolly, Stansfield, & Hainey, 2007). A detailed evaluation was conducted with both language teachers and students across Europe. Before the main pilot was evaluated in 2009, two mini-plots were run at the end of 2008 in Bulgaria and early 2009 in Spain. The

Discussion

Despite some negative comments, the ARG project team considers the pilot study to have been largely successful with feedback from both language teachers and students generally being supportive and favourable. During the time that the ARG ran students uploaded 826 files that included images, audio, video and presentations, and submitted 9135 quest answers. One of the main problems in undertaking the evaluation was the lower than anticipated response rate from the students who had completed both

Conclusions

Overall the evidence collected from the pilot study appeared to indicate that the Tower of Babel ARG provided a potentially useful educational platform for motivating students to engage in activities relating to the learning of a second language. Both language teachers and students considered the ARG to have provided a stimulating and collaborative environment and provided opportunities for them to engage with their peers in different languages from across Europe in sharing knowledge and ideas

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the EU Comenius Programme under contract 133909-2007-UK-COMENIUS-CMP.

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