GamES MOOC
Conceptual Ideas and First Steps Towards Implementation of a MOOC for
Children
Kay Berkling
1
, Abdullrahman El-Husseny
2
, Dennis Latt
1
, Christian Petrov
1
, Andreas Waigand
1
and Jochen Walther
1
1
Department of Computer Science, Cooperative State University, Kalrsruhe, Germany
2
Department of Computer Science, German University of Cairo, Cairo, Egypt
Keywords:
MOOC, Children, Gamification, Game-based Learning, K-5, Common Core Standard, M-Learning.
Abstract:
This paper presents conceptual ideas and a first prototype towards establishing a GamES (Gamified
Elementary School) MOOC for children who do not have access to schools. The project is being developed
across several Bachelor student projects in collaboration between Cooperative State University, Karlsruhe and
the German University of Cairo. A hybrid architecture is designed to support children on mobile devices with
intermittent Internet access. Upon access, current learning status and new content are updated. The content
consists of leveled games addressing skills defined by the US common core standards for K-5 in subjects
Mathematics and English (that can be adapted to other languages). The children’s MOOC combines ideas
of adaptive user interface, off-line personalized learning, common core standards, and game-based learning.
The child’s user interface is gamified and after initial registration designed to be manageable for K-5 graders.
A second interface addresses the community of game developers who are interested in donating games for
certain core skills. In a next step, assessment and government certification of achievements will be tackled.
The MOOC software is intended as open source to allow for community development.
1 INTRODUCTION
Education matters. It is the primary factor in eco-
nomic growth. It improves the overall health of a pop-
ulation. It also helps in creating and sustaining demo-
cratic governments and provides the necessary skills
for running an effective government (Birdall, 2006).
Unfortunately, according to the 2011 ’Education
for All’ Monitoring report of the UN, one of the first
casualties in war is education. Not only are chil-
dren in war-torn developing countries almost twice
as likely to not be enrolled in a school, even when
compared to countries with an equally low GDP, but
they are also 20% more likely to drop out of school,
30% less likely to enroll in secondary education and
20% less likely to be literate when they reach adult-
hood (Watkins, 2011, p. 132). Even more unfortu-
nate is the fact, that the number of people living in
conflict-ridden areas is increasing daily. Ever since
the year 2008 global peace has decreased in almost
every part of the world (Institute for Economics and
Peace, 2014), which means that an increasing number
of children grow up not being able to go to school or
even get a basic education in some other way.
One alternative is M-learning. Even though Inter-
net user growth in the developing world has slowed
down, the growth was still significant at more than
10% between 2009 and 2013 (Jorge, 2015). Since
cell phones in the developing world are ”nearly ubiq-
uitous” (Wike and Oates, 2014) it is not hard to imag-
ine a world where Internet access is almost constantly
provided. Meanwhile, education is difficult to obtain,
economically or safely. Many see MOOCs (Massive
Open Online Courses), as a solution to this problem.
Even though they are a move in the right direction
MOOCs are criticised that most of their content relies
on constant Internet access, and even if the MOOC
platforms provide offline applications, they require
huge amounts of data, like videos, to be transferred
to the childrens devices via the Internet (Roberston,
2015). MOOCs also rarely provide content that is age
appropriate for K-12 or K-5 children, mostly focusing
on College education. In fact, 83% of MOOCs stu-
dents have finished their secondary education (Chris-
Berkling, K., El-Husseny, A., Latt, D., Petrov, C., Waigand, A. and Walther, J.
GamES MOOC - Conceptual Ideas and First Steps Towards Implementation of a MOOC for Children.
In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU 2016) - Volume 1, pages 405-412
ISBN: 978-989-758-179-3
Copyright
c
2016 by SCITEPRESS Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved
405
tensen et al., 2013). There are also issues with re-
tention (Khalil and Ebner, 2015). Khan Academy
presents one of the MOOCs that are addressing chil-
dren, however not open source in content or platform,
nor game based. Khan academy is often used together
with schools (Murphy et al., 2014).
The goal of this project is to develop a prototypi-
cal platform, that mediates what are considered weak-
nesses for our target audience by presenting adaptive
course material in a manner that is available offline
with minimal need for Internet updates. Age appro-
priate education is approached through game-based
learning. Key is to motivate children through games
in the absence of teachers. In order to achieve this,
learning game skills are tied with US Common Core
Standards for English and Mathematics with a view
toward adaptation to other languages. The next step
is to crowd source the content, mediated through so-
cial networks. In this way the architecture, content
and maintenance is fundamentally different to exist-
ing platforms like Coursera and edX, as examples.
While these platforms host the content, the platform
described here represents a highly structured back-
bone for content (ie. games) that is hosted elsewhere.
The principles of MOOCs still apply as defined in
(Yousef et al., ), in particular, the term ”Massive”
refers to the capacity of the course to expand to large
numbers of learners. The platform is called GameES
(Gamified Elementary School) MOOC.
The rest of this paper proceeds as follows. After
a description of the functional and non-functional re-
quirements of the proposed application in Chapter 2,
Chapter 3 discusses the Common Core Standards and
how these will be used for the gamified user interface.
Chapters 4 and 5 describe the learning interface de-
sign and the underlying architecture and first screen-
shots of the prototype under development before fin-
ishing with a conclusion on future work. The material
presented here is work in progress and therefore does
not yet have a chapter on evaluation.
2 REQUIREMENTS
There are a number of requirements specific to the
described children’s MOOC that relate to the func-
tional (children and contributors) and non-functional
requirements.
1. Usability for K-5
2. Adaptivity
3. Motivational
4. Self-guiding
5. Extensibility for community support
6. Accessibility combining off-line with on-line ac-
cess
7. Compatibility with minimal mobile technology
2.1 Child Interface
Usability for K-5 is not trivial. Furthermore, adapt-
ability is important according to child, learner type,
age, learning-status. For example, in Kindergarten
one cannot assume reading skills. Users can get over-
whelmed when they are presented with too much in-
formation or can get lost when no navigation help is
provided (Brusilovsky, 1998). Basically, the interface
should fit all users and adapt to a specific user accord-
ingly. Since GamES MOOC is designed to deal with
young children this is especially important. In order
to achieve this, we draw on motivational theories in
connection with games, allowing adaptation to gamer
type (Metawaa and Berkling, 2016). Self-guidance
is solved through a gamified interface that includes
levels according to standard learning sequences and
successive unlocking as skills are acquired.
2.2 Offline Availability
Constant Internet access, especially broadband, is ex-
tremely rare in the developing world. In Africa, for
example, only 1% of the population has broadband
access and only 12% have any Internet access on a
regular basis (ITU, 2015). Due to irregular Internet
access efficient data usage is of primary concern (His-
cott, 2015). Offline availability can be achieved with
many different technologies, however, it is important
to realize that mobile platforms vary by region. While
Android is very common, rivals like Windows Phone
and FirefoxOS are on the rise. So, to reach the broad-
est number of children, GamES MOOC should ide-
ally be able to work offline on almost every platform.
2.3 Easy Extensibility
The platform is intended to live through community
donations by game developers. Therefore, it must be
easy to plug games into the platform and hook them
into predefined sets of skills. While there is a vari-
ety of learning software on the market, ranging from
MOOC platforms to educational games, none of these
are easy to extend. Only one of the eleven most used
platforms support an external API for easy integration
(Ortega et al., 2014). In order to make use of the al-
ready existing technologies regarding education soft-
ware communication and interaction, GamES MOOC
needs to be easily extensible. Therefore, it should of-
fer an easy to use API with minimal requirements for
CSEDU 2016 - 8th International Conference on Computer Supported Education
406
Table 1: Common Core Terminology.
Course English Language Arts Mathematics
Grade K-12 K-12
1st Level Strands (L = Language) Domains (OA = Operation/Algrabraic Thinking)
2nd Level Anchor Standards (1 = Conv. of Stand. Engl.) Clusters (C=Add and subtract within 20)
3rd Level Standard / Skill Standard / Skill
Skill
example
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.L.K.1.a CCSS.Math.Content.1.OA.C.6
GamES
example
Many apps exist already that teach drawing
upper- and lowercase letters on screen
Many apps exist already with playful
add/subtract games in the range 1-20
plugins and additional software, including a specific
interface for game developers who donate games (cor-
responding to lessons in the proposed construct).
3 CONTENT
In order to provide content, games have to address
skills. To level the games for learners, the skills need
to be leveled and specific. Such predefined standard
skills are then used to connect with the game when
they are plugged into the platform. The following
steps are necessary to enable the MOOC with this fea-
ture:
In a first step, the US common core standards
were analyzed to contain specific and leveled stan-
dards of skills for both English and Mathematics
for Kindergarten through Grade 5. (CCSS, 2010).
An intuitive interface is needed to enable game
designers to sort their games into skills.
The standard levels are used to create an individ-
ual yet sequenced learning experience for the chil-
dren’s interface.
3.1 The Common Core Standards
The Common Core Standards is an initiative to in-
crease the value of learning in schools. They focus
on standardising specific fine-grained content and se-
quencing of skills that are measurable and intended
to prepare students for college and career. Our focus
is on English and Mathematics standards for K-5 as
the foundation needed by students. The standards are
criticized for being used more for testing rather than
preparing students for their future careers. However,
for our purpose they provide standard sequencing and
a way of potentially testing into the correct level with-
out the need for a school or teachers.
3.1.1 Terminology
The platform uses the terminology of the US com-
mon core standards as defined below for the GamES
MOOC. Grade is the year of study to which a learn-
ing standard is assigned. We are looking at K-5 in
a first round. A grade could be determined accord-
ing to a test or assigned by a mentor/teacher/parent.
Courses are ”Subjects” (f.ex. English, Mathemat-
ics) defined by Common Core State Standards. Their
availability depends on the child’s grade. Strands are
the key areas for English Standards: Reading (Lit-
erature and Informational), Writing, Speaking and
Listening and Language. Domains are analogous
to Strands for Mathematics and may vary by grade.
Anchor Standards repeat for each grade and con-
tain grade specific skills for English. Clusters fulfill
the same function for Mathematics but may vary by
grade. Clusters and Anchor Standards contain Stan-
dards or Skills by grade. Skills are specific abilities
that can be taught, learned and tested for. A game
is associated with one or more skills. The proposed
platform GamES MOOC provides the backbone for
leveling and making these games available according
to the standards. Figure 1 intends to clarify the termi-
nology with an example.
3.1.2 English
The Common Core for English Language Arts has 4
Strands (Language, Reading, Writing and Speaking
and Listening). The Anchor Standards are the same
across grades K-5. The reading standards empha-
size the complexity of reading content introduced to
the students. The sophistication increases grade by
grade. The student must be encouraged to connect
missing pieces and ideas and develop an observation
of weak reasoning in text. Writing standards aim to
develop the ability to use writing styles: arguments,
informative, explanatory texts and narratives. They
also emphasize helping students observe the writing-
reading connections and write about it. They also aim
GamES MOOC - Conceptual Ideas and First Steps Towards Implementation of a MOOC for Children
407
to develop the students research skills. The speaking
and listening standards works on the oral and inter-
personal skills of students. They aim to develop team
work, listening and communication skills among stu-
dents. They also aim to develop the student’s flexibil-
ity in adapting what he/she says according to context.
Finally, the language standards provides the essential
guidelines of using the English language within the
activities of all the standards.They work on vocabu-
lary, phrases, their relationships and grammar in gen-
eral. The acquired vocabulary and other skills should
be useful for the student across different domains and
different subjects.
In order to link a game to specific skills, these have
to be detailed and concrete. This may not be possi-
ble for all Anchor Standards. As an example for En-
glish Grade 1, Strand for ”Language”, Anchor Stan-
dard for ”Conventions of Standard English” (Page 26)
the Standard 1 ”Demonstrate command of the conven-
tions of standard English grammar and usage when
writing or speaking” is defined as follows (CCSS,
2010):
(a) Print all upper- and lowercase letters.
(b) Use common, proper, and possessive nouns.
(c) Use singular and plural nouns with matching
verbs in basic sentences (e.g., He hops; We hop).
(d) Use personal, possessive, and indefinite pronouns
(e.g., I, me, my; they, them, their; anyone, every-
thing).
(e) Use verbs to convey a sense of past, present, and
future (e.g., Yesterday I walked home; Today I
walk home; Tomorrow I will walk home).
(f) Use frequently occurring adjectives.
(g) Use frequently occurring conjunctions (e.g., and,
but, or, so, because).
(h) Use determiners (e.g., articles, demonstratives).
(i) Use frequently occurring prepositions
(e.g.,during, beyond, toward).
(j) Produce and expand complete simple and com-
pound declarative, interrogative, imperative, and
exclamatory sentences in response to prompts.
3.1.3 Mathematics
In Mathematics a course consists of domains (Geom-
etry, Algebraic Thinking, Measurement & Data...etc).
Each domain in turn consists of clusters and each
cluster consists of standards as shown in Figure 1. An
example of skills for the domain ”Measurement and
Data” is shown in Figure 2.
The categories in Math are not fixed across the
early grades but they revolve around some topics: Op-
erations and Algebraic Thinking, Number and Oper-
ations in Base 10 and Fractions, Measurement Data
and Geometry. The domains and clusters may change
according to the focus of the grade. The standards for
grades Kindergarten to Grade 5 provide students with
a strong base in whole numbers, addition, subtraction,
multiplication, division, fractions and decimals in or-
der to provide a sound foundation.
Figure 1: Domains and Clusters in the Common Core Stan-
dards for Mathematics.
Figure 2: Grade 1, measurements according to US Common
Core Standards.
3.2 Using the Standards and Structure
Standards are available via XML format for develop-
ers at their hostsite (corestandards.org). In a first ver-
sion, the standards used in the software are the stan-
dards in the category of Language for grades: Kinder-
garten, Grade 1 and Grade 2. That is because these
skills are is category provides standards with more fo-
cus on small foundational skills. In Math, the used
standards in the software are the standards in all cat-
egories for grades: Kindergarten, Grade 1 and Grade
2. Generally, each category in each grade might have
one or more domains and each domain has one or
more clusters. The learning experience is designed
as an individual path through these skills as explained
in more detail in Section 4.3.
CSEDU 2016 - 8th International Conference on Computer Supported Education
408
Figure 3: Use cases overview.
4 LEARNING INTERFACE
DESIGN
This chapter deals with the functional requirements
for both the learner and the game designer perspec-
tive.
4.1 Use Cases
Use cases describe how a user of a specific role will
interact with the software and the goals this actor can
achieve. The overall Use Case diagram is shown in
Figure 3 (This depiction was chosen over UML stan-
dard due to readability).
4.2 Actors
The Application has three key actors. The teacher that
is usually present in education environments is absent
in this diagram. The premise behind the tool is that
teachers are not available. In future a contributor role
is envisioned that is described below.
4.2.1 Administrators
The administrator has the ability to restructure the
standards and update the content. This actor can fur-
thermore moderate third-party content.
4.2.2 Student
Children or students use the system to update their
games and status when online and play games to gain
skills offline. Games are updated by using a sort of
MOOC app store that presents available games based
on current skill level.
In a first step, the user interface focuses on chil-
dren in the age group from Kindergarten to Grade 2.
GamES MOOC - Conceptual Ideas and First Steps Towards Implementation of a MOOC for Children
409
The software is personalized by focusing on creating
a learner’s experience that adapts to his/her perfor-
mance and interests. The learner can play the games
offline without the need for continuous Internet ac-
cess. Students can sign up for the GamES MOOC
by registering and then using their account. The stu-
dent is then able to view the list of courses offered
by the MOOC and can enroll in any of the courses.
Each course has categories and each category has a
set of unlocked and locked skills and each skill has
registered games that have been assigned to skills. A
student signs up and uses the account to view courses
and their categories anytime. On each category page,
the student can view the unlocked games in this cate-
gory. Each game has a link to its android store page
for downloading. Registered games to the MOOC
have to enable the student to login and submit scores
in the game using API requests. The student’s expe-
rience provides more motivation, autonomy and free-
dom to the student and is accompanied with a mech-
anism for unlocking games using the standard’s de-
fined sequence. The mechanism is discussed below.
4.2.3 Developers
Developers build apps. They are usually game devel-
opers that adjust the skills to learning content accord-
ing to the standards and can hook their games into the
MOOC by adding plug-ins to the game to provide for
single sign-on, gamer statistic maintenance and score
uploading to the server upon Internet availability. The
app is reviewed by the administration team.
The developer has support with access to the API
documentation of a skill if registered for it. The API
demands only 2 requests to be included in the game:
Logging in and submitting a score. Submitting a score
triggers a set of background actions that updates a stu-
dents performance level and unlocks new games if
necessary. The API and documentation helps speed
up the process for the developer who donates his/her
game.
4.2.4 Contributors
A future extension includes a more general role for di-
verse individuals, willing to contribute to the MOOC
with ideas, experiences and time. The contribu-
tors can be teachers, designers, home-schooling par-
ents, parents, educators, college professors and oth-
ers, making up the community that supports the plat-
form. Contributors and developers have a rich com-
munication channel with up-votes, down-votes, com-
ments, ideas’ bank and the ability to send an e-mail to
any of the contributors or developers. Both developers
and contributors have to register to a skill as contribu-
tors to be able to view the skill’s page and benefit from
the features. The skill registration provides trackable
experiences that would help make the communication
more efficient in the future. It also draws the attention
to ignored skills.
Figure 4: Learning experience flowchart.
4.3 Designing the Learning Experience
The interface for the student uses the core standards
to sequence the student learning. However, the or-
der of the courses or the speed a student chooses in
order to work through the levels in each shapes the
child’s experience in a very individual manner. Each
of the skills in a course has any number of games as-
sociated with it. For example, course ”ELA”, Strand
”Language”, Grade 1, Anchor Standard ”Vocabulary
Acquisition and Use” has three Standards (L.1.4-6) of
associated games open. Once mastered (as defined by
the game scores), this level is completed and the next
level for this anchor standard opens, which is in Grade
2. (Alternatives to consider: 1) All anchor standards
and clusters in a strand or domain must be completed
before moving on to Grade 2. 2) All strands and do-
mains must be completed before moving on to Grade
CSEDU 2016 - 8th International Conference on Computer Supported Education
410
Figure 5: Software Architecture.
2.) Future work must study the effect of this freedom
on related skills as the Common Core should be seen
as an integrated approach across strands and domains.
Figure 4 shows this process as a flowchart explain-
ing the games’ unlocking mechanism and the stu-
dent’s performance levels. Initially, the courses first
level games are all unlocked for the student to down-
load and play. After each score submission, a series of
milestone checks are triggered to update the student’s
unlocked games and levels if needed. The experi-
ence provides autonomy and motivation for the stu-
dents. Autonomy exists through giving the students
the choice of game they wants to play and the choice
of domain they like to progress in, regardless of offi-
cial grade or overall performance across all domains.
Motivation exists through the design of levels. Lev-
els encourage the student to compete with themselves
or peers. The system encourages the student to play
diverse games across all domains, in order to level up.
5 TECHNOLOGY AND
ARCHITECTURE
Technology and Architecture is important when con-
sidering an offline/online construct. The general ar-
chitecture is depicted in Figure 5.
5.1 Technology
The chosen technology is Ruby on Rails with a server
side MVC framework. It is designed for the purpose
of making the development of web applications eas-
ier by emphasizing the use of conventions that saves
much of the code usually used for configurations.
Ruby on Rails provides open source free gems and
plug-ins that provide extra customization and func-
tionalities. The combination of qualities means that
the code will be easier to maintain as open source
code.
It emphasizes the principle of not repeating code
which improves maintenance and eliminates am-
biguity.
It can generate an admin panel automatically.
Active records provide a trivial, easy to use inter-
face to the database.
The ruby command line supports all platforms and
enables many administrator tasks.
There is a strong community with rich documen-
tation.
It uses an MVC framework.
The software architecture consists of 4 main com-
ponents: the HTML browser, the app store, and the
MOOC server. The HTML browser interacts with
the server using HTTP requests and responses and
the interaction works only online. The browser pro-
vides links that lead to the MOOC ”store” to down-
load unlocked games on the device connected to the
users account on the official app stores (Google play
or iTunes store). The game sends post requests to the
server to update student progress on particular skills.
The server consists of a restful API to receive re-
quests from games and a SQL relational database car-
rying all data about students, developers, contributors,
games and other elements in the software. Figure 5
provides an overview of this architecture.
5.2 Architectural Considerations
The following concepts are important for the architec-
ture.
Plugin - Plug-ins to modify skill level: A game
that works within the GamES MOOC must be
able to connect to the main server to update and
modify the skills achievement based on a player’s
achievement within the game.
Single Sign-on - The game has to provide a com-
mon sign-in name with the GamES MOOC. Secu-
rity between MOOC and games uses standards for
secure authentication such as OAuth 2.0 Bearer
(Jones and Hardt, 2012).
Skill - A skill belongs to a game, a Standard
and a player. Their accomplishment by a student
is modified through the plug-in from within the
game.
Course - A course has a grade, a Strand or Do-
main, and an Anchor Standard or Cluster made
up of skills. A student is enrolled in a number of
courses according to grade.
Off-Line - Skills scores must be kept on the de-
vice until an online connection is established. At
GamES MOOC - Conceptual Ideas and First Steps Towards Implementation of a MOOC for Children
411
this time, the data has to synchronize with
the server.
6 CONCLUSION
The work described here presents an ongoing process
of establishing a community supported MOOC plat-
form for children. The inspiration for this project is
the lack of educational opportunities for so many chil-
dren. In some parts of the world, schools lack motiva-
tion for learning while in other parts, motivation for
learning is not sufficient because no (safe) access to
(quality) education exists. The Common Core Stan-
dards were used to provide proven standardized con-
tent and sequencing. The platform was designed with
a critical and flexible approach with an appropriate
architecture taking into account the target audience’s
life style and limitations, such as no access to teach-
ers, availability of mobile phones but rare Internet ac-
cess.
The topic of social networks, community support,
assessment and government certification are impor-
tant next steps to tackle. These points are vital corner-
stones for increasing motivation and traffic and pro-
viding rich content. The project provides an opportu-
nity for the community of educational games to coop-
erate. Many existing educational games can be con-
nected to the software without spending extra time on
building new games. This is especially relevant as the
number of educational games is rapidly growing. Lit-
tle work is done in academia in this area and it poses
immense challenges.
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