=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2609/AfCAI2019_paper_5
|storemode=property
|title=A Gamification approach for education on values: results from a pilot study
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2609/AfCAI2019_paper_5.pdf
|volume=Vol-2609
|authors=Raquel Menendez-Ferreira, Roberto Ruiz Barquin, Antonio Maldonado, David Camacho
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/afcai/Menendez-Ferreira19
}}
==A Gamification approach for education on values: results from a pilot study==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2609/AfCAI2019_paper_5.pdf
A gamification approach for values education:
results of a pilot study
Raquel Menendez-Ferreira1 , Roberto Ruı́z Barquı́n1 ,
Antonio Maldonado1 and David Camacho2
1
Teacher Training and Education Faculty.
Universidad Autónoma.Madrid 28049, Spain.
raquel.menendez@inv.uam.es, roberto.ruiz@uam.es, antonio.maldonado@uam.es
2
Departamento de Sistemas Informáticos
Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Madrid 28031, Spain.
david.camacho@upm.es
Abstract. The inclusion of video games with training purposes in phys-
ical 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 affective 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 specifically, 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.
Keywords: Video game, Sports games, values education, behaviour,
affective, Gamification
1 Introduction
Traditionally, sports has been a fundamental human activity that have had a
great influence 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 [1, 2] that are transmitted and reproduced by the
Copyright c 2019 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative
Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
youngest. This is the reason why education in values in the field of sports is
important from a very early age.
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 [6] and some of them focus on value teaching in football training [7–9],
very few studies incorporate video games in the learning process. For these
reasons, SAVEit project emerges relevant to create new methodologies for values
promotion, developing training material for the coaches and a video game for
the players.
Traditionally, there are 5 types of programs applied to physical education
and sports: a) Sport-based life skill program [10, 11], b) physical and social
responsibility program [12, 13], c) socio-moral education [14, 15], d) sports for
peace [16] and e) fairplay programs [17]. The tools and methodologies used in
these programs include group discussions and moral dilemmas among others [18].
Although the outcomes of these programs have been positive, they can become
boring for youngsters accustomed to pay more attention to electronic devices. As
keeping the motivation of the children is one of the challenges in education, it is
important to develop innovative methodologies using video games.
Next section will provide a brief introduction about how video games can
be used to induce emotions and change behaviours. Section 3 describes the
gamification 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, behaviours and video games
Emotions and behaviour have an important role in children development. On
recent years, researchers have found that emotions play a key role in the develop-
ment of personal and social skills; more specifically, affect, 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 ” [23].
There are evidences of the positive emotional effects 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. [24] conducted
a study about learning perspectives on video games. They established four kinds
of learning outcomes that games might induce: cognitive, motor skills, affective
learning and communicative learning [24]. Related to the affective learning, there
are some examples of the use of games to desensitizing fears and phobias. In this
sense, they highlighted that Half-Life game could be useful to confront the fear
of spiders and London Racer to deal with accident phobia. In both experiences,
http://saveitproject.eu/
the results showed positive results and a change of attitude related to their fears
and phobias. For these reasons, video games can facilitate attitudinal change
because they have a great potential as a tool for promoting social values.
An example of how games can be used to promote some social values is
provided by Paracha et al. [25], who developed a serious game known as Shimpai
Muyou!. This game is focused on confronting Islamic bullying, promoting the
culture and values of this religion. It combines intelligent instructional and
narrative concepts to teach children (8-12 years old) how to manage emotional
and sensitive situations that are common at schools. Through ethical dilemmas,
children have to make decisions, explore strategies and face the consequences of
their actions. The results of this project were capable of influencing the childrens
perception of bullying and increase their awareness, moral understanding and
empathy [25].
3 Gamification approach
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 gamification
approach, the next steps were followed:
Fig. 1. Summary of the gamification approach model[26] built in the SAVEit project.
1. Values definition: five values were chosen to be teached during the inter-
vention: 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 gam-
ification 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 gamification 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[26, 27]. Children obtain skill
points when they demonstrate their understanding of the values presented,
and when they adopt those values on their behaviour. Coaches are in charge
of evaluating the attitudes and behaviour of the children, introducing these
evaluations in the video game. In order to connect the evaluations with
the video game, we have created the application called ”team management
application” where the coaches have to create and register the teams and
also evaluate the behaviour of the children. Figure 1 shows a summary of the
proposed model. Once teachers have evaluated the behaviour of the children
these evaluations are connected with the video game and translated into
skill points. These skill points are distributed by the children among several
technical characteristic of their virtual teams.
4 Methodology
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 fill 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 different 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 fill 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 affect to the performance of the virtual team of each child.
CODE INDICATOR D1 D2 D3
Ind1 Assumes the rules established by the Club, team / coaches
and managers of the facilities.
Ind2 Assumes the work of the partners in the tasks in the field.
Ind3 Respect the companions in the coexistence of the locker
room.
Ind4 Assumes the decisions of the coaches (without gestures,
answers or protests).
Ind5 Respect decisions of the arbitration team (without ges-
tures, answers or protests).
Ind6 Accepts opinions different from their own from their
coaches, partners and / or followers.
Ind7 He is educated with colleagues, technicians and followers
regardless of their affinity with them.
Ind8 Greets and says goodbye when arriving and leaving the
facilities or locker rooms in training and games.
Ind9 Give thanks when appropriate.
Table 1. Example of the survey used to measure the different indicators for the value
”Respect”.
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 Preliminary Results
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 different
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 different 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 different coaches have fulfill the different 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 partici-
pated 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
5
4
3
Evaluation
Mean
Dec. 17
Dec. 18
2
1
0
8−9 years 10−11 years 12−13 years
Children
Fig. 2. Mean measurements of the ”Respect” value
In order to clarify this result, we are going to analyze the individual evaluations
of this specific 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 figure, 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.
Individual evaluations for Respect Value
14
12
10
Number of Children
8
Evaluation
Dec. 17
Dec. 18
6
4
2
0
Ind. 1 Ind. 2 Ind. 3 Ind. 4 Ind. 5 Ind. 6 Ind. 7 Ind. 8 Ind. 9
Indicators
Fig. 3. Evolution of the attitudes of the children per indicator.
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 difficult 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 difference 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.
6 Conclusions
The gamification approach presented in this work is an innovative resource to
values teaching in the field 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 [28].
This work presents the preliminary analysis of the pilot conducted under
the application of SAVEit project[29]. In this case three different groups are
taken into account ranging from 8 to 13 years old. The results reveal that groups
ranging from 8 to 9, and from 12 − 13 years old have increased positively their
attitude towards the ”Respect” indicators. On the other hand, the group of
10 − 11 years old showed slightly lower values which may indicate that this group
is not motivated by the video game or maybe the activities developed to promote
values were not motivating for the children.
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 specific group. The ”Respect” value is
composed by 9 different 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 difference 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 different 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 influence their global behaviour.
7 Acknowledgments
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-1-
2016-2-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-AG-
RAD-Radicalisation).
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