Branching Out: Skill Trees for Education and Self-Improvement

Branching Out: Skill Trees for Education and Self-Improvement

Tuesday 14/05 17:30-19:00h

Workshop Space A

Needs Analysis

This interactive workshop aims to introduce the topic of serious educational games (SEGs), and specifically the concept of Skill Trees, to PhD candidates in the TEL community. The objective of this workshop is to design a Skill Tree for a fictional Educational Game in an engaging way. The process will involve a novel design framework presented by the researchers that guides the participants step-by-step through the design process of Skill Trees.
We aim to answer these research questions:

• What are the common frameworks that can be used for designing Skill Trees?
• How can Skill Trees be designed that fit into the context of different TEL domains?
• How can Skill trees help PhD candidates to structure and reflect on their Skills?

Learning Objectives

• To understand the difference of gamification and serious games for educational purposes.
• Learn about different frameworks for designing engaging and fun Skill Trees for SEGs.
• Evaluation and classification of SEG elements.
• Integration of Skill Trees for personalized learning.
• Incorporate SEGs and Skill Trees in the syllabus.

Pre-activities

The participants don’t have to prepare anything it advance. The workshop is prepared for beginners and experienced participants in the field of educational games as well as participants interested in the topics of educational games, serious games, and gamification.

Session Description

• 20’ interactive gamified presentation: learning outcomes, frameworks for Skill Trees of educational games, best practices in the field of SEGs and Skill Trees for Gamification, HyTea and preliminary results.
• 55’ Skill Tree process group work: identifying key learnings, paper prototyping of a Skill Tree with the content that has been evaluated from an expert interview.
• 15’ Conclusion and Discussion: recap and takeaways, survey