24/07/2018

Through collaboration of experts in different fields (game designers, psychologists, pedagogues), eConfidence developed two serious games focused on safe use of internet ('Go Online') and bullying prevention ('School of Empathy') in the past year as part of our project objectives.

Against this background, eConfidence project partners from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (FHSS) of the University of Rijeka worked together with the project coordinator, Instituto Tecnologico Castilla y Leon (ITCL) to publish a scientific paper through IATED, presented on 3 July 2018 at EDULEARN18 in a session on serious games.

The participation at EDULEARN18 was a great opportunity for eConfidence partners to present our project research and developments at the 10th annual International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies, held in Palma de Mallorca (Spain). 2nd - 4th of July, 2018.

The paper presented is providing examples and explanations of ABA principles application, as well as application of motivational principles in design of bullying prevention game named School of Empathy, to which Intervention Mapping Protocol (IMP, Bartholomew et al., 2011) was applied.

As pointed in the „Applying psychological principles in design of a serious anti-bullying game within eConfidence project" paper abstract, within the eConfidence project the effectiveness of designed games is tested on a sample of early adolescents from 10 European schools. In designing games elements both ABA and other psychological principles of motivation have been considered. Motivation principles can be reflected in different game characteristics (such as fantasy, goals, sensory stimuli, challenge, mystery, and control; Garris, Ahlers, & Driskell, 2002) and game design elements (such as points, badges, leaderboards, performance graph, meaningful stories, avatars, and teammates; Sailer et al., 2017).

More information about the paper can be found in paper detail and abstract.