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6 DISCUSSION
The evaluation results show that the Matchballs
game was perceived as a casual game. Based on the
data generated during the game sessions we were
able to identify 17 relevant associations or relations
previously not present in the ontology. These
relations were integrated by knowledge engineers. In
this sense, our learning game can also be seen as a
“game with a purpose” to enrich an initial ontology
is feasible.
Thus, the game may be used as an interactive
mechanism for closing gaps in the. At the moment,
the game can only be used for adding new relations
to the ontology. In the future, we plan to use the
game to acquire knowledge from new fields in class
sessions. The teacher may add an originally
disconnected set of new concepts to an existing
ontology. The students are then asked to play the
game by connecting these concepts with each other
as well as with the old ones, thus integrating them
into the existing ontology. This activity may be
viewed as a multi-player concept map creation game
in which the players create a shared concept map.
Concept maps have been successfully used as
learning tool for linking existing and new knowledge
as well as for evaluation and identifying valid and
invalid ideas of students (Novak & Canãs, 2006). If
the game is played in single player mode, the game
may still be used as an advanced vocabulary trainer.
Even when playing the game individually the
students still collaborate indirectly. Teachers can use
the game to extract information about typical
misconceptions of the group but also of individual
students.
In the context of the FoodWeb2.0 project there
have already been several requests by teachers and
students for transferring the game to further
knowledge domains. We will try to incorporate these
domains and enhance these ontologies with specific
feedback on the newly introduced relations. For the
multi-player scenario, feedback will be given about
the existence of these relations in the ontology. In
single-player scenarios the feedback will identify
possible misconceptions automatically based on
information on particular error types explicitly
represented in the ontology. Similar to intelligent
tutoring systems the semantic ontology structure will
be used for the generation of generic feedback.
Evaluation results concerning the FoodWeb2.0
platform in general (and not only the game lements)
are currently Janus-faced: On the one hand, the
perceived usefulness of the platform rated by the
students in general is very high. They like to be able
to look up subject matters on the internet, especially
if the trainer or peer students provide additional
information for further learning. On the other hand,
the trainers are either very enthusiastic or quite
reluctant to use the platform. Those of the trainers
that are enthusiastic often underestimate the time
needed for transforming their material and lesson
planning to an online supported course. The
reluctant ones overestimate the needed effort and
underestimate their students’ skill with Web2.0
tools. The trainers usually have a professional
background in one of the disciplines related to the
food industry (like veterinaries, food engineers or
biologists) but not in pedagogy. This may explain
why some of them are hesitant to employ
collaborative learning strategies in their courses and
consequently have issues with Web2.0 learning.
They use a “traditional” line of argumentation: loss
of control, quality control of the results, perceived
inefficiency of group work. Thus, they are surprised
by their students’ enthusiasm to work with the
platform and by the positive results that are
achieved. We plan to conduct an elaborate study
concerning the perceived usefulness of our platform
differentiated by roles and the changes to the course
content and pedagogical design that have happened
as a consequence of student feedback and the
projects’ “train-the-trainers” program.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We would like to thank Christopher Charles, Peter
Horster, Dominik Kloke, Carolin Pohl and Carsten
Wieringer, who implemented the Matchballs game
during a student project.
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