The inclusion of video games with training purposes in physical and sport education has not had a big impact so far. However, as traditional methodologies to promote values can bore young people, the interest generated by video games can be a good tool to attract them. On an a ective and emotional level, knowledge acquired through practice with games, or video games, is more meaningful for children. With these reasons in mind, along with the interest of overcoming negative values typically related with sports, a group of researchers started a project to join video games and education on values called SAVEit. The goal of this project is to use new technologies for promoting values on sports for children. More speci cally, a learning methodology was designed focusing in the use of football video games, on which each children's virtual team performance depends on the children attitudes and behaviour in real life. This paper presents the preliminary outcomes of the pilot study carried out in a Spanish sport club, paying attention to the Respect value, and how students from 8 to 13 years old acquired it using the system.
Traditionally, sports has been a fundamental human activity that have had a
great in uence on people's life. Communities of fans emerge around sports that
promote both positive and negative values. Unfortunately, sports such as football
are constantly threatened by violent incidents inside and outside the stadiums.
This generates a set of negative values, such as violence, racism, discrimination
and intolerance, among others [
Many of the reviewed studies related to values promotion in physical education
and sports focus on identifying the values, beliefs, attitudes or motivations of
the research subjects [3{5]. Although some studies focus on the value teaching
processes [
Traditionally, there are 5 types of programs applied to physical education
and sports: a) Sport-based life skill program [
Next section will provide a brief introduction about how video games can be used to induce emotions and change behaviours. Section 3 describes the gami cation approach that SAVEit developed to promote social integration between youngsters. Section 4 describes the methods and tools used to obtain data during the pilot study. Finally, Sections 5 and 6 shows the main results and conclusion extracted from this study. 2
Emotions and behaviour have an important role in children development. On
recent years, researchers have found that emotions play a key role in the
development of personal and social skills; more speci cally, a ect, attention, memory
and decision making processes [19{22]. Emotions are also related with motivation.
As Johnson and Whiles states, \if a game does not generate positive emotions in
the user, it is unlikely to succeed " [
There are evidences of the positive emotional e ects on users behaviour. In
fact, there are some researchers who have analyzed the use of video games to
treat phobias and change attitudes and behaviors. Wouters et al. [
An example of how games can be used to promote some social values is
provided by Paracha et al. [
In order to create an attractive and motivating learning methodology, it was
decided to develop a football video game adaptable to the attitudes and behaviours
of the players themselves. This means that, if a child shows good behavior during
the training sessions and shows that he understands which is the value teached,
he will obtain skill points that improve his performance in the video game. A child
who does not act according the values teached will have a lower amount of points
to improve his skills on the video game. In order to develop this gami cation
approach, the next steps were followed:
1. Values de nition: ve values were chosen to be teached during the
intervention: 1) Respect, 2) Order, 3) Healthy Habits, 4) Companionship and
5) Coexistence.
2. Design of an online course for the coaches: this step was conducted to teach
the educators related to the project how to transmit values and how the
gami cation approach works. The main purpose of this approaches is to provide
activities and materials related to the values used in the intervention. And
then use them in their training sessions to allow to acquire the corresponding
knowledge regarding these values.
3. Develop the video game: using the software called Unity, a football simulation
game was developed. In this video game, children have to play matches against
bots and the gami cation technique used aims to keep children motivated to
have a good behaviour during the real training sessions. This engagement
is produced because the skill points of the children inside the video game
depend on the attitude of the children in real life[
The sample analyzed on this study was composed by 14 children between 8 and 13 years old from a Spanish football club. The gathering of the data was conducted using questionnaires and non-participating observation. The data extraction was conducted twice during the project: at the beginning of the implementation (in December 2017), and at the end of the football season (in December 2018). Coaches spent 3 days of observation, having to ll daily the questionnaires with the information gathered during the training sessions. It is important to remark that during these training session coaches have to implement the activities learned in the online course and also evaluate the behaviours and attitudes of the children.
The pre-test and post-test questionnaires were di erent for each value studied. Figure 1 shows the questionnaire related to "Respect", the value which will be analyzed on this pilot study. This questionnaire shows several indicators about the attitudes and behaviour designed to evaluate the corresponding value. During the training sessions coaches have to ll the table with +1 if the child manifests a positive attitude, or 0 if the child does not manifest the attitude or he/she https://unity.com/es shows a negative attitude. It is important to keep in mind, that these scores are translated to the video game through the "team management" application, and these results a ect to the performance of the virtual team of each child.
There was also a group questionnaires to measure the global behaviour of the team related to the "Respect" value. The questionnaire was composed by several indicators related to this value. In this case, coaches are requested to assess each of these indicators at group level, i.e. how the corresponding indicator is shown in the group. In this case the possible responses ranges from 1 to 5 where lower values mean that the corresponding indicator is not showed in the group, whereas 5 means that the member of the group have incorporated this indicator in their daily life. 5
This section provides an initial evaluation of all the data gathered through the method described in the previous section. This analysis is split in two di erent groups depending on the type of data analyzed: group and individual evaluations.
This initial study has been focused on the "Respect" value, and we have analyzed the results of 3 di erent teams where children have 8-9, 10-11 and 12-13 years old respectively. These three teams have been evaluated by their coaches, therefore in this study 3 di erent coaches have ful ll the di erent questionnaires.
It is important to note that for this preliminary study, all the participants belongs to the experimental group. This means that all the children have participated in the whole process including the video game.
In an initial study, the group evaluations for the "Respect" value are studied. As a global measure, Fig. 2 shows for each team the mean evaluations for each team: 1) 8-9 years old, 2) 10-11 years and 3) 12-13 years.. In this case, there are an increase in the age groups of 8-9 years and 12-13 years between both evaluations which means that these user groups have been more motivated with the proposed application. However, the group of 10-11 years old showed a decrease in the mean value. A possible reason about this result could be that the video game designed, or the activities developed during the training, are not interesting enough for this age range and thus, children are not motivated to incorporate the value because they are not engaged with the learning process.
Group evaluations for Respect value 8−9 years 10−11 years Children 12−13 years
In order to clarify this result, we are going to analyze the individual evaluations of this speci c group. The results about the individual evaluations of the children individually are shown in Fig. 3, where each Indicator code (Ind1, Ind2;. . . Ind9) is shown on the x-axis, while in the Y-axis is number of the children that have shown the attitude related to each indicator of the "Respect" value. As it can be observed in this gure, the preliminary results show an increase in the number of children that have positive attitudes in the majority of the indicators. More precisely, 7 out of 9 indicators show the increase, which means that children have incorporated this attitude after the implementation of the methodology. 5 4 3 n a e M 2 1 0 Evaluation
Dec. 17 Dec. 18 Individual evaluations for Respect Value Evaluation
Dec. 17 Dec. 18 14 12 10 n e r ild 8 h C f o rbe 6 m u N 4 2 0
Ind. 1
Ind. 2
Ind. 3
Ind. 4
Ind. 5 Indicators
Ind. 6
Ind. 7
Ind. 8
Ind. 9
There are two indicators (Ind1 and Ind4) that children do not improve. In this case, at the end of the implementation less children showed Ind1, and there was not any change regarding Ind4. These two indicators are "Assumes the rules established by the Club, team / coaches and managers of the facilities " (Ind1) and "Assumes the decisions of the coaches (without gestures, answers or protests)" (Ind4). Therefore an explanation about this behaviour is that playing in a football team implies a lot of emotions, and in some situations (specially if there are children playing) it is quite di cult to assume some decisions, like leave the game and let another partner to play in your position when the result is bad, or when you are not playing well.
To sum up, we have observed a bad result in the questionnaire regarding the group, but analyzing in details the results of the individual questionnaires we do not observed this behaviour. Therefore there is a di erence regarding the questionnaires. This could be produced due to the fact that coaches could not be interesting in the evaluation process due to the high number of the evaluations they had to do.
The gami cation approach presented in this work is an innovative resource to values teaching in the eld of sports. Not only because we have developed a methodology for training coaches in sport values, but also because we have introduced a video game as tool to engage children to have better behaviour.
The use of video games as tool for motivating children to improve their
behaviour is based on the idea of transforming intentional children behaviours
into habitual behaviours. Although, children learn the new behaviours to improve
the skills of their virtual teams, these new behaviours will be repeated, or adopted,
without conscious intention in the real life [
This work presents the preliminary analysis of the pilot conducted under
the application of SAVEit project[
This result can make sense if we keep in mind that the same video game cannot motivate in the same way to children of 8 years old and children of 10 years old. Nevertheless, a deeper study has been done, and we have analyzed also the evaluation for each children in this speci c group. The "Respect" value is composed by 9 di erent indicators and the children belonging to the group of 10-11 years old improve, at the end of the implementation, 7 out of 9 indicators. This di erence suggest that coaches could not be really involved in the evaluation process.
This paper presents a preliminary study that must be extended and studied in details in several ways, a deeper study is required to understand the performance of the methodology at two di erent levels: 1) At the individual level of the children, i.e. to perform a deeper analysis on the evaluation of all the children in the indicators of the 5 values presented in this methodology. 2) At the group level, to understand how the methodology impacts on their behaviour as a group, or whether there are other aspects that in uence their global behaviour. 7
This work has been supported by the following projects: SAVE IT "Saving the dream of grassroots sport based on values" under the Erasmus+ SPORT 2016 programme, Support to Collaborative Partnershipsnt action (579893-EPP-12016-2-ES-SPO- SCP), DeepBio (TIN2017-85727-C4-3-P by Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness), CYNAMON (P2018/TCS-4566 by Comunidad de Madrid), both under the European Regional Development Fund FEDER, and YoungRes project under Grant 823701-ISFP-2017-AGRAD (ISFP-2017-AGRAD-Radicalisation).