The practice of sports play an important role in the behavioral development of both players and supporters. The educational impact over the sport practitioners has a high in uence especially in children and youngsters. To translate adequate values from the sport activities to the nal behaviour of them, requires from an adequated educational methodology, and from new and innovative tools, which could be used by educators and coaches (in the case of sport activies) to guide the youngsters adequately to avoid threats as racism, intolerance or violence. This paper presents a new educational methodology that has been designed to be later applied to a video game (based on football), to learning sports values and, at the same time, avoiding non-desirable behaviours. The nal gami cation approach is based on two related software systems: the rst one, allows to coaches evaluating the behaviour of kids during their training and matches. The second one takes the coaches evaluations, and transform them into skills points. These skills points are later used by the kids to improve the performance of their Non-Player Characters (NPC) in the video game (so their football team performance in the video game, will depends on their behaviour in the sport activities). The paper presents both, the educational methodology designed, and the two software modules developed (coaches evaluation system and video game).
to the success of the education system maintaining health, correcting social
inequalities, and improving social inclusion and promoting solidarity [
In many European countries the promotion of a social and moral development
of children through the physical education it is a core element of their curriculum
[
However, in the las two decades some sports have become a negative in uence
for the children development due to the increasing number of threats presents
around it such as violence, racism, discrimination and intolerance, among others
[
The main contribution of this work is the presentation of our gami cation experience to promote sports values for children, who belong to di erent European clubs of football. The paper aims to describe the methodology applied when designing a gami cation experience to teach sport values to a group of children. Through this video game and the application of gami cation elements we pretend to motivate children (who are already involved in sportive activities) to learn sports values and, at the same time, modify their behavioral patterns, when these behaviours are not adequate in terms of violence, intolerance or other non desirable values for the society. 2
Education in sports values through gami cation
Traditionally, sport values have been associated to competition, health, personal
e ort, equality, spirit of justice and the pursuit of victory by own merits, etc [
This work agrees with the idea that it is necessary to provide innovative tools
and educational programs in order to teach sports values. Resources such as
Virtual Worlds (VW) [
as Arti cial Intelligence or Computational Intelligence, have demonstrated that
the application of algorithms, techniques and methods [
Games technology is widely available, fun and entertaining for people of
all ages. Its utilization combined with traditional training and educational
approaches it could provide one of the most powerful tool for knowledge transfer in
almost every application domain [
Gami cation it is a novel concept that has increased its popularity in recent
years, it was developed in the Industry in 2008, although it was not until 2010
that the adoption became widespread. The rst documented use of the term
gami cation was in 2008 and this concept was de ned as the use of the game
design elements, in non-game contexts with the intention of increasing the
participation of a person and motivate him/her to learning something or introduce
new patterns of behaviour [
Increase the motivation of users or provoke them certain motivations through
the use of video games is also a new issue that is been studied through the
A ective Game. A ective Games research have focused theirs e ort to adapt
the video games to the users emotional state, through the evaluation of the
emotions and replaying them with changes in the dynamics of the game [
The implementation of this type of technologies in the education eld has had
positive results due to children feel more motivated to complete the activities or
challenges proposed [
A gami cation design framework: the SAVEit project The main goal of the SAVEit is to design innovative learning materials to promote sports values between children and youngsters football player. For this reason it has been proposed a learning methodology using gami cation techniques.
The starting point of this project was developed a football video game and the software system to connect sports values with the video game, and then design a methodology of learning sports values using the video game as a gami cationbased tool. 3.1
In order to developed the football video game it has been followed the gami
cation design elements proposed by Professor Werbach [
{ Components: are the resources and the tools that we use to design the game. These are achievements, avatars, levels of game, process-bars, rankings, quests, virtual goods, etc. { Mechanics: are the basic components of the game that drive the action forward and generate player engagement. These are the rules of the game, the challenges, competitions, cooperation, feedback, resource acquisition, rewards, trading, turns, or win states { Dynamics: are the way in which the mechanics are set in motion; they determine the users' behavior and are related to the motivation of the player. For example constraints, emotions, narration, relationships and progression.
Taking into account all these elements (see Figure 1). The outcome was a football video game with the following characteristics: { Components of gami cation: it has been used football avatars, rankings and di erent levels of di culty, etc.
Main categories 1. TOLERANCE 2. RESPECT 3. TEAM SPIRIT 4. PERSONAL EFFORT 5. GAME ENJOYMENT
Related Values De nition 1. Sportsmanship Positive behaviours towards opponents, accepting
defeats. 2. Tolerance Respect and consideration for other people, regard
less of their personal or social singularities. 3. Companionship Respectful relationship with playmates. 4.Concern for others Showing interest for the members of the opposing
team. 5. Obedience Accepting the decisions of the coach and /or referee.
Respect rules of the game. 6. Team Cohesion Do something for someone else and for the sake of the team performance, maintain tactics, and game style (explicit and implicit) recommended by coach. 7. Reception Admission of another person to the group and
active support, seeking their well-being. 8. Showing skills Be able to use correctly skills or abilities required
in game situations, both technically and tactically. 9. Conscientious Doing ones best all time, and not letting others
down. 10.Game enjoyment Enjoying the game regardless the result, experi
encing feelings of satisfaction. 11. Contract maintenance Playing according to the spirit of the game, ac
cepting what happens.
Table 2. Sport Values most voted. { Mechanics: in the game the users have to gain points to improve the skills of their Non-Player Characters (NPC). This improvement is translated to a better chance of obtaining best results in the game. Therefore, the video game provides an external reward to those kids with better behaviour during the training and matches. Best players in the game will obtain these rewards given by their coaches, such as tickets to an o cial football game, visit the rst team of the club, etc. { Dynamics: children have to play a football match against the teams of their colleagues. The main motivation for the children is to gain points to improve their skills in the virtual team, but also to compete for the best position in the virtual league.
Once we had the video game developed, the second step was to identify which
are prevalent values in football. After a review, 25 values were extracted from
the state of the art related to sports [
The third step was to design a software system to connect values with the video game. An application for coaches was developed, where they had to create the football teams and sign up the children on the application, where they could assess the behaviors and sports values (see Figure 2). 3.2
Once we had the tools developed (football video game and coaches' application), a learning methodology was established to promote sports values using these tools and it is divided in the following actions:
INDICATORS Greetings upon arrival at the facilities or changing rooms during training and matches Say goodbye when leaving the facilities and/or chaining rooms in training and matches.
Give thanks when it is appropriate.
Respect the rules established by the Club, the team/coaches and facility managers.
Respect for colleagues in the pitch Respect for peers in the changing room Respect for the technical sta (not to gesticulate when they make decisions, not to answer...).
Accept the di ering opinions of his colleagues
D1 D2 D3 D4 D5 D6 D7 D8 D9 D10
In rst place, a learning course on sport values was developed, it is composed by 5 modules, that coaches must follow in order to learn how to promote sport values, and then implement these contents in their training sessions and assess the values and behaviours of the children. For these evaluations, coaches will have to evaluate each player individually on a set of established indicators through a evaluation form (Table 3 shows an example of questionnaire to assess the respect value, D is the days of evaluation) where, they will have to tick the box of positive attitudes that occur satisfactorily on each training day during a period (10 days in the example showed in Table 3). If it is not ful lled in a positive manner, the box of that indicator should be left blank. After each day there will be a summation that will give us the nal score of the child. That will be translated into the application web for the coaches (Fig 3 shows an example of the evaluation of a child in the all the sports values).
Once a coach has evaluated their team and the grades have been stored in the database, these data can be accessed from the video game. When a player logging in, the game will get him/her a x number of skill points. These skill points are calculated as the average value obtained per each kid taking into account the coach assessment. Equation 1, shows how these points are obtained, where e:value is the points given by coach per each "sport value", during the training or match sessions. These points are divided by the total number #e of "sport values" considered per kid. Then, this result is divided by 10 and multiplied by 20, to convert it into a score between 2 (minimum points) to 20 (maximum points). Finally, this number of skill points will be distributed by the player among the ve NPC attributes: Speed, Resistance, Strength, Defense and Technique, each a ecting to a di erent aspect of their Non-Player Character in the game (see
P = 20 Pe2Ei e:value 10 #e (1)
In the A ective game eld, the emotions and behaviour of the user have
usually been evaluated through a monitoring hardware systems to gather emotional
information from the player [
Currently, the project is running on the second stage, the next step will be
to deploying and testing the videogame in order to evaluate their usefulness
and impact of the project over the target groups (coaches, parents and children
enrolled in grassroots sport clubs).
Education in values is a relevant issue that should be considered as key
element in the design of any educational program and have an special relevance in
the sports education. As it was mentioned in the introduction of this work, in
many European countries the social and moral development through the physical
education it is a fundamental part of their curriculum [
The gami cation presented in this work born with the idea it is possible to
transform intentional children behaviours into habitual behaviours through the
human motivations present in the games. Although, these behaviours will be
learned with the intention to improve their skill points in the video game, the
use of these behaviours may be repeated without conscious intention [
In the near future, the video game will be tested on real scenarios using di erent football clubs currently involved in the SAVE it project. The di erent values considered in this research, and presented previously in section 3.1, has been tested and evaluated by a set of 12 professional coaches belonging to the K.A.S Eupen Footbal Club at Belgium 5. The methodology proposed has been evaluated and revised by the di erent partners associated to project. Currently, a rst pilot has been designed to be applied in a control group of kids to assess the usefulness of the methodology proposed. 5
Acknowledgement This work has been supported by the SAVE IT project: "Saving the dream of grassroots sport based on values" under the Erasmus+ SPORT 2016 programme, Support to Collaborative Partnerships action (579893-EPP-1-2016-2-ES-SPOSCP).