Session Abstract
The field of Game-Based Learning has contributed advances that help us understand how people learn from gameplay, in what context they might learn best, and what domains might be best suited to playful learning. While there has been a growth in our understanding of the space of theory and development in educational game design, there has been a relatively less work done in developing common methods and approaches for understanding learning in games. This is particularly apparent in contexts where gameplay is highly varied or complex and where learning might only be apparent across a range of player behaviors. The field of Game Analytics has tools that could be leveraged in this space, however, they have generally not been applied to questions of learning. To address this need for further common techniques within the field we have created the Open Game Data Project with the goal of fostering a community of researchers who are interested in understanding approaches to game-based learning analytics and working toward a common toolbox of methods.
This session will showcase this growing community with a masterclass in the form of an open consulting session with the game based learning analytics researchers. In this session a researcher or developer from Field Day will come to a panel of experts including the authors with a game based learning research question that they are interested in exploring. The experts will then work with them to determine how best to approach it both in instrumentation of data, engineering of data features, and development of analytic strategies. The goal of doing this consulting session in public will be to serve as a worked example of how experts think about approaching this space and expose attendees to tools and methods that exist in the context of a grounded case. Attendees will then be able to come away with an impression of different kinds of methods and techniques and also infrastructural supports that exist as well as join the community and go on to contribute to the growth of the field in their own ways.
