=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2524/paper4
|storemode=property
|title=The DoCENT role play game: a tool for the training of the digital creativity for teachers
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2524/paper4.pdf
|volume=Vol-2524
|authors=Raffaele Di Fuccio,Fabrizio Ferrara,Andrea Di Ferdinando
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/psychobit/FuccioFF19
}}
==The DoCENT role play game: a tool for the training of the digital creativity for teachers==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2524/paper4.pdf
The DoCENT role play game: a tool for the training og
the digital creativity for teachers
Raffaele Di Fuccio1, Fabrizio Ferrara2 and Andrea Di Ferdinando1
1 Smarted srl, Via Riviera di Chiaia 256, 80121 Napoli, Italy
2 Università di Napoli Federico II, Via Porta di massa 1, 80133 Napoli, Italy
raffaele.difuccio@gmail.com
Abstract. In the framework of the DoCENT project (Digital Creativity EN-
hanced in Teacher education) co-funded by the Erasmus+ programme of the Eu-
ropean Union, the authors developed a serious game, based on role playing game
methodology. The paper shows the structure of the game with particular results
on the management of feedback for the teachers derived from an adaptive tutor-
ing system. The teacher has the possibility to interact with a classroom in a virtual
and safe environment and could train the teaching of digital creativity in a real
context. In the paper the authors describe the DoCENT game developed on the
pedagogical framework of digital creativity, a set of six different students' com-
petences areas. The game includes different scenarios designed in order to cover
all the competence areas and train the teacher on each aspect and that cover dif-
ferent digital creativity activities, namely: 1) coding activities for children (i.e.
Scratch), 2) tangible user interfaces applications, 3) STEM application with dig-
ital interfaces. the feedbacks.
Keywords: Role playing Game, Tutoring Systems, Digital Creativity, Serious
Game, Pedagogical Framework, Students’ competences Area
1 Introduction
1.1 The Digital Creativity
The quick increase of innovations, technologies and the advent of digital market
boost new jobs and new opportunities for all kind of workers. Also, the traditional jobs
benefit from these innovations. In order to gather these opportunities, the workers need
a combination of new skill and competences that comprise abilities and learning dispo-
sitions in a multidisciplinary and holistic approach. In parallel, workplaces are changing
and it represents a challenge for the current workers and the workers of tomorrow. Or-
ganizations needs approaches to managing people and production systems in ways that
assure the transformation of inputs into quality outputs, in order to meet employees’
expectations. A better use of their knowledge and skills leads employees to increase
their job satisfaction and commitment (indicators of organizational well-being). Fur-
thermore, organizations are more productive and profitable if they are able to design a
workplace that creates congruence between employer and employee interests.
Copyright © 2019 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
2
At the same time, the creativity is a valid approach in order to face new challenges,
to see out of the box, however the potential of the creativity linked with new tools in
the digital era are very promising. This perspective it is the same of the document the
Council Recommendation on Key Competences for Lifelong Learning of the European
Commission, when describe the Digital Competence states “Individuals should be able
to use digital technologies to support their active citizenship and social inclusion, col-
laboration with others, and creativity towards personal, social or commercial goals” 1
considering a strong overlap with the creativity.
The project DoCENT (Digital Creativity ENhanced in Teacher education) aims to
propose a solution oriented to initial teacher education (ITE). The idea is to prepare a
new generation of teachers, aiming to enhance digital creativity in ITE contexts. In this
view, the definition of the digital creativity [1] of the DoCENT project is the use of
digital technologies to develop processes that address to creativity
The project, funded by the European Commission in the Erasmus+ programme that
is ongoing, aims to develop, implement, validate and disseminate an innovative model
to guide teacher educators in applying digital creative teaching practices.
DoCENT project has its nature in the education field, promoting, disseminating and
increase awareness on digital creative teaching. The idea is to apply digital pedagogies
to develop processes that are particular to creativity, i.e. promoting learner-centred
methodologies, allowing for self-learning, helping to make connections, boosting ex-
ploration and discovery, providing a safe environment that encourages risk-taking be-
haviours and encouraging collaboration. This approach finds its completion in the de-
velopment of a role-playing game, a serious game, for teachers where they could train
their abilities regarding the learning of digital creativity in the classroom.
2 Prototype description
2.1 The Serious Game for the DoCENT Project
The DoCENT Serious Game (DSG)2 has the structure of a role-playing game that al-
lows teachers to test and train himself/herself in a safe environment in order to learn
the best strategies for the application of digital creativity in school.
The context is the classroom where children try to use digital tools and the teacher
takes the role of a facilitator in order to elicit the application of these technologies in a
creative way.
Commonly, the role-play boots new ways of thinking and a way to use objects and
interact with people in real routine contexts. This method brings different dramatic in-
struments derived from sociodrama and psychodrama, such as replaying a scene or a
part of a scene, role reversal, making asides, mirror and double [5]. These enactment
1 https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-con-
tent/EN/TXT/?uri=uriserv%3AOJ.C_.2018.189.01.0001.01.ENG&toc=OJ%3AC%3A2018
%3A189%3ATOC
2 www.docent-project.eu
3
tools facilitate learners to explore their emotions, concepts and thoughts from a de-
tached perspective, and the development of metacognition capacity. [24]
The DoCENT game give the opportunity to the teachers to test a real experience of
classroom where they are able to apply the creative thinking with digital tools. Teacher
could promote learner-centered methodologies, stimulate the autonomous learning,
prevent and solve technical issues, manage collaboration between peers using digital
interfaces, allow discovery and curiosity and finally propose a safe environment that
encourages risk-taking behaviours.
The game is developed with three different scenarios that have the aim of the in-
volvement of the teachers in the reflection of three different technological fields. In
particular, the fields are: 1) coding activities for children (i.e. Scratch) [13, 25], 2) tan-
gible user interfaces applications [6, 15, 17, 20], 3) STEM application with digital [13,
14]. The scenario, that was co-created with the teachers during specific co-design work-
shop in three countries (Italy, Spain and Greece) [7], are designed to:
• propose a real management of a class;
• allow the teacher or any kind of caregiver/tutor/parent to go deepen in real
class environment in a safe way;
• test the interaction with students.
During the project, the researchers delivered a pedagogical framework [23], this
aims the definition of digital creative teaching competences, thus the key-components
of competences needed by teacher educators for effectively integrating digital creativity
in teaching contexts, as well as to provide and validate an EU reference framework for
developing and evaluating digital creative teaching competences.
Based on the structure of the DigCompEdu framework [3], the DoCENT pedagogi-
cal framework considers the professional and pedagogical competences of educators,
as well as the development of students' competences. It is divided into six areas:
• Area A teachers’ professional environment, i.e. application of technologies in col-
laboration with members of the educational community;
• Area B competences required to identify, create and share digital creative resources;
• Area C digital creative pedagogies, application of digital technologies in teaching
and learning;
• Area D use of digital strategies to assess and foster students’ creativity;
• Area E: potential of digital technologies for promoting learner-centred strategies;
• Area F focuses on the competences required to enhance students’ digital creative
competences.
Based on this structure, each scenario cover two areas listed before, in order to cover
all the areas. An important module of the DoCENT game is the intelligent and Adaptive
Tutoring System (ATS) [19]. The aim of this module is to produce a game interaction
that can effect on the reply of the use, defining personalized paths. The system adapts
itself based on the user interactions and provide at the end of session a feedback. This
feedback describes all the interactions and choices during the game. At the end, there
is a suggestion for the teacher to repeat or rethink about those scenarios or those inter-
actions where the user has a greater margin of improvement. This feedback allows to
4
reflect on the class management and allows a re-play to try again the interaction with
the classroom.
Fig. 1. The image shows a feedback in DoCENT Game with a suggestion based on the Adap-
tive Tutoring System that relates with the interaction of the user during the role-playing game.
3 Conclusion and future directions
The DoCENT Role Playing game is a serious game application developed for teachers
and for teacher education in the field of digital creativity. The short paper shows the
structure of the serious game and focus on the Intelligent and Adaptive module of the
system.
The Serious Game developed proposes scenarios for teacher in three main field,
namely: 1) coding activities for children (i.e. Scratch) [13, 25], 2) tangible user inter-
faces applications [6, 15, 17, 20], 3) STEM application with digital [13, 14]; supporting
new frontiers of application that are a novelty for teachers. The game is downloadable
from the project website, available for Microsoft.
The next step brings to the development of the Android App of DoCENT game for
smartphones and the browser game.
4 Acknowledgment
The DoCENT project (Digital Creativity ENhanced in Teacher education) is co-
funded by the Erasmus+ programme of the European Union, in the call Key Activity 2
– Strategic Partnership and runs between October 2017 and September 2019.
References
1. Barajas, M., Frossard, F., & Trifonova, A. Strategies for Digital Creative Pedagogies in To-
day’s Education. In Active Learning. IntechOpen. (2018).
5
2. Beghetto, R. A. Creativity in the classroom. In J. C. Kaufman, & R. J. Sternberg (Eds.), The
Cambridge handbook of creativity, pp. 447-463. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge,
UK. (2010).
3. Carretero, S., Vuorikari, R., & Punie, Y.. DigComp 2.1: The Digital Competence Frame-
work for Citizens with eight proficiency levels and examples of use (No. JRC106281). Joint
Research Centre (Seville site). (2017)
4. Craft, A. Creativity and education futures: Learning in a digi-tal age. Trentham Books, Eng-
land. (2011).
5. Dell'Aquila, E., Marocco, D., Ponticorvo, M., Di Ferdinando, A., Schembri, M., & Miglino,
O. Educational Games for Soft-Skills Training in Digital Environments: New Perspectives.
Springer, Germany. (2016).
6. Di Fuccio, R., Siano, G., & De Marco, A. The Activity Board 1.0: RFID-NFC WI-FI Mul-
titags Desktop Reader for Education and Rehabilitation Applications. In World Conference
on Information Systems and Technologies (pp. 677-689). Springer, Cham. (2017).
7. Di Fuccio, R., Ferrara, F., & Di Ferdinando, A. (2019, June). The DoCENT Game: An Im-
mersive Role-Playing Game for the Enhancement of Digital-Creativity. In International
Conference in Methodologies and intelligent Systems for Techhnology Enhanced Learning
(pp. 96-102). Springer, Cham.
8. Dodero, G., Gennari, R., Melonio, A., & Torello, S. (2014, April). Gamified co-design with
cooperative learning. In CHI'14 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Sys-
tems (pp. 707-718). ACM. (2014).
9. Ferrari, A., Cachia, R., & Punie, Y. 23. ICT as a driver for creative learning and innovative
teaching. Measuring Creativity, 345. (2009).
10. Frossard, F., Barajas, M., & Trifonova, A. A learner-centred game-design approach: İmpacts
on teachers’ creativity. Digital Educa-tion Review, (21), 13-22. (2012).
11. Frossard, F., Trifonova, A., & Barajas, M. Teachers designing learning games: impact on
creativity. In Video Games and Creativity (pp. 159-183). (2015).
12. Galvagno, M., & Dalli, D. Theory of value co-creation: a sys-tematic literature review. Man-
aging Service Quality, 24(6), 643-683. (2014).
13. Grizioti, M., & Kynigos, C. Game modding for computational thinking: an integrated design
approach. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Interaction Design and Children
(pp. 687-692). ACM. (2018).
14. Hanson, K., & Carlson, B. (2005). Effective Access: Teachers' Use of Digital Resources in
STEM Teaching. Education Development Center, Inc.
15. Lancioni, G. E., Singh, N. N., O’Reilly, M. F., & Alberti, G. (2019). Assistive Technology
to Support Communication in Individuals with Neurodevelopmental Disorders. Current De-
velopmental Disorders Reports, 1-5.
16. Marocco, D., Pacella, D., Dell’Aquila, E., & Di Ferdinando, A. Grounding serious game
design on scientific findings: the case of ENACT on soft skills training and assessment. In
Design for Teaching and Learning in a Networked World (pp. 441-446). Springer, Cham.
(2015).
17. Miglino, O., Di Ferdinando, A., Di Fuccio, R., Rega, A., & Ricci, C. (2014). Bridging digital
and physical educational games using RFID/NFC technologies. Journal of e-Learning and
Knowledge Society, 10(3).
18. OECD. Innovativing Education and Educating for Innovation, http://www.oecd.org/educa-
tion/ceri/GEIS2016-Background-document.pdf, last accessted 2019/02/11
19. Ponticorvo, M., Rega, A., & Miglino, O. (2018, June). Toward tutoring systems inspired by
applied behavioral analysis. In International Conference on Intelligent Tutoring Systems
(pp. 160-169). Springer, Cham.
6
20. Ponticorvo, M., Di Fuccio, R., Ferrara, F., Rega, A., & Miglino, O. (2018, June). Multisen-
sory educational materials: five senses to learn. In International Conference in Methodolo-
gies and intelligent Systems for Techhnology Enhanced Learning (pp. 45-52). Springer,
Cham.
21. Prahalad, C. K., & Ramaswamy, V. Co-opting customer competence. Harvard business re-
view, 78(1), 79-90. (2000).
22. Sefton-Green, J., & Brown, L. Mapping learner progression into digital creativity. (2014).
23. Sica, L. S., Ponticorvo, M., & Miglino, O. (2019, June). Enhancing Digital Creativity in
Education: The Docent Project Approach. In International Conference in Methodologies
and intelligent Systems for Techhnology Enhanced Learning (pp. 103-110). Springer, Cham.
24. Weinert, F. E., & Kluwe, R. HMetacognition, motivation, and understanding. Hillsdale: Erl-
bau. (1987).
25. Wilson, A., Hainey, T., & Connolly, T. M. (2013). Using Scratch with primary school chil-
dren: an evaluation of games constructed to gauge understanding of programming concepts.
International Journal of Game-Based Learning (IJGBL), 3(1), 93-109.