Storyboarding Serious Games for Large-scale Training Applications

Sebastian Arnold, Jun Fujima and Klaus P. Jantke

Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology, Children’s Media Dept., Erich-K¨astner-Str. 1a, 99094 Erfurt, Germany

Keywords:

Game Based Learning, Game based Training, Storyboarding, Staff Training, Disaster Management.

Abstract:

Beyond the limits of conventional media such as motion picture and theater dominating the passed centuries,

storyboarding means the design of interaction to meet anticipated affective and effective human experience.

Storyboarding plays a key role in research and applications in areas such as interactive digital storytelling,

but in e-learning, in general, and in game based learning, in particular, there shows an enormous deﬁciency.

There is abundant evidence for the need of establishing storyboarding in the design of game based learning.

Large-scale training applications reaching thousands of trainees in operation are particularly demanding.

A certain game developed and implemented for training of staff in disaster management demonstrates the

inevitability of storyboarding as a key technology of design supporting adaptive system behavior, in particular.

Storyboards are digital objects within a systematic design and development process. Storyboarding supports

the completeness and correctness of the design. Visual features of a storyboard allow for checking different

balances such as the one between learning about a human learner and adapting to the learner’s individual needs,

desires, and preferences. Furthermore, storyboards allow for an intuitive editing of the interaction scenario.

1 THE AUTHORS’ POSITION

Digital games to be deployed for realistic large-scale

learning and training applications are highly com-

plex digital systems. The manifold of possible inter-

action sequences is enormous; the storyboard in use

throughout this paper, just for illustration, contains

13 006 893 219 840 paths from the start node to one

of the end nodes.

Games purposefully designed and implemented

challenge the human imagination of forthcoming

sequences of human-system interactions and their

potential points of branching or conﬂuence. Story-

boards are tools to represent anticipated experiences

(Jantke and Knauf, 2005).

Consequently, one should imagine storyboarding

investigations to play a certain role in educational

research and reﬂections thereon. Far from it, just for

illustration, the whole proceedings of the last CSEDU

conference contain only a single paper dealing with

storyboarding (Jantke and Knauf, 2012) and one more

paper using the term (Colasante and Lang, 2012).

In response, the authors present this submission

to advocate storyboarding by means of a large-scale

training application currently used by the German

agency for civil protection and disaster management.

2 TRAINING OF PREPAREDNESS

FOR DISASTER MANAGEMENT

The German Federal Agency for Civil Protection and

Disaster Management (German acronym: BBK)–an

Agency of the Federal Ministry of the Interior–in its

academy located near Ahrweiler is providing training

to more than 1,000 people of staff per year to be well-

prepared for any type of natural or technical disaster.

The present authors provide software modules for

game based training to the BBK’s academy.

It is difﬁcult to predict, especially the future, is a

saying ascribed to the Danish physicist Niels Bohr.

This applies to forthcoming disasters, in particular.

Staff members of crisis management groups can

not be confronted to all possibly forthcoming details.

In addition to some large amount of knowledge and to

the acquisition of behavioral skills and patterns, staff

needs to familiarize with acting in the conditions of a

crisis. Repeated game play in varying situations is an

appropriate methodologyof developing preparedness.

The aim of this paper is to advocate the authors’

position that storyboarding is a valuable technology

of serious games design and implementation and to

convince the readers by means of a certain practically

relevant serious game for real training operations.

651

Arnold S., Fujima J. and P. Jantke K..

Storyboarding Serious Games for Large-scale Training Applications.

DOI: 10.5220/0004415606510655

In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU-2013), pages 651-655

ISBN: 978-989-8565-53-2

 2013 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

3 STORYBOARDING FOR

PURPOSES OF EDUCATION

This paper uses storyboarding as a technology, but

does not aim at anything such as an introductory

course to storyboarding. The authors rely on the ideas

introduced by (Jantke and Knauf, 2005) and con-

ﬁne themselves to those notions and notations needed

for storyboarding game-based learning. Recent work

on storyboarduing digital games such as (Jantke and

Knauf, 2012), e.g., is worth some comparison.

Figure 1: Cutout of some storyboard of a digital game

showing two alternative graph substitutions for one episode.

Storyboards are hierarchically structured graphs.

The composite nodes are named episodes, whereas

the atomic nodes are named scenes. Composite

nodes may be subject to substitution by other graphs.

Atomic nodes, in contrast, have some semantics in the

underlying domain. They may represent documents

such as videos, pictures, or text ﬁles in any format,

but they may also represent some activities of human

learners, teacher, tutors, or those actions performed

by certain digital systems. The usage of composite

nodes in a graph allows for the representation of an-

ticipated experiences on different levels of detail.

Just for illustration, ﬁg. 1 above is showing two

alternative substitutions for an episode. The graphs

for substitution on display contain only scenes which

have a particular operational semantics. In general,

subgraphs may also contain episodes.

Graphs may contain branches and loops, where

there are different branches for indicating alternatives,

multiple choices, parallelism of action, and the like.

Every storyboard speciﬁes a usually rather large

number of paths through the storyboard describing,

for instance, varying experiences of game playing or

different ways of learning.

The art of storyboarding is to anticipate and to

specify in detail the manifold of forthcoming actions

including human-computer interaction. It takes into

account off-line activities as well as human-human

communication and physical interaction.

4 STORYBOARDING FOR

EDUCATIONAL ADAPTIVITY

There is no need at all to advocate adaptivity on a

conference of computer supported education, because

every good teacher is used to adapt to the needs of his

students. There are excellent publications in the ﬁeld

such as (Brusilovsky, 1996), (Brusilovsky, 2001), and

(Brusilovsky and Maybury, 2003).

Adaptivity came ﬁrst up in natural language pro-

cessing research (Perrault et al., 1978) and found

some consolidation in the middle of the nienties of

the last century (Oppermann, 1965).

Nowadays, adaptivity is widespread and opinions

vary largely. Many authors prefer a low expectations

approach seeing adaptive hypermedia systems as any-

thing which reﬂects some features of the user in the

user model and apply this model to adapt various vis-

ible aspects of the system to the user, as expressed by

(Henze and Nejdl, 2004), for instance.

Largely independent and unrelated research work

in educational and developmental psychology, in par-

ticular, and cognitive science, in general, suggests

deeper modeling approaches like, e.g., Conceptual

Change Theory (see (Carey, 1985), (Carey, 2000), and

(Thagard, 2012)).

Taking such background research of adaptivity

into account, apparently user modeling may be seen

as theory induction (Jantke, 2013). A system being

adaptive is inductively building some theory about its

current user’s needs and desires. The digital system’s

behavior, at every moment in time, is based on the

recent state of the hypothesized theory.

This view does perfectly apply to all the well-

established learner models, user model, and player

models currently in use.

For demonstrating storyboarding serious games in

use in large-scale training applications, the authors

have chosen the learner model of (Felder and Silver-

man, 1988) which meets the requirements of learning

to act in the focused application domain.

After the two short introductory sections on the

present page of the position paper, the following

pages will contain detailed material of the authors’

application project.

When certain user proﬁles are on display, they

represent Felder-Silvermann-based theories on some

current learner. The storyboards report the authors’

design process in which human playing and learning

experiences are anticipated.

The storyboards are represented in XML (more

precisely: RDF) such that the running system works

by interpreting the speciﬁed interaction opportunities.

CSEDU2013-5thInternationalConferenceonComputerSupportedEducation

652

5 PRACTICAL STORYBOARDING

OF STAFF TRAINING TOWARD

DISASTER MANAGEMENT

PREPAREDNESS

This section is demonstrating the authors’ position by

means of a report about some relevant application.

The TRAST system developed for the German

Federal Agency for Civil Protection and Disaster

Management has been implemented in UNITY as a

Figure 2: Storyboard of one of the seven staff positions in the training system TRAST; storyboard cut into four pieces.

3D game module. For major roles in a crisis manage-

ment staff, storyboards like the one on display in ﬁg. 2

have been developed. It is not intended to read any of

the inscriptions in the storyboard graph below, but to

get an impression of some storyboard as a whole.

The rectangular nodes represent particular scenes

in the game story. A node includes some actions ac-

tivated by the system when the game state is reaching

the node. Actions may be any atomic system behav-

iors such as showing a text message dialog, showing

some pictures, or setting up an interaction button on

StoryboardingSeriousGamesforLarge-scaleTrainingApplications

653

an object in the game. Nodes are connected with tran-

sitions (represented as arrows in the ﬁgs. 2 and 3).

Some transitions have labels which indicate names of

Figure 3: Cutout of the TRAST storyboard at node 100.

events ﬁred by the system according to users’ choice

in the game play or their proﬁles. When the system

detects an event in a speciﬁc node, the system selects

the transition which is labeled with the corresponding

event name and takes the transition to proceed.

Figure 4: Moment of the learner’s choices when playing.

Due to the restricted space within this position pa-

per, the authors conﬁne themselves to an illustration

of the storyboard’s relevance for implementing the

key feature of adaptivity.

At all nodes colored in red, the players have

choices which are interpreted by the digital system

and reﬂected in the user proﬁle. The nodes colored in

green include different system behaviors according to

the user proﬁle.

The scenery on display in ﬁg. 4 shows the sys-

tem’s interpretation of the storyboard cutout in ﬁg. 3.

In scene 100, the learner has three different choices

to act indicated by orange buttons (from left to right):

Writing a message, talking to the staff member next

to the map, inspecting the map.

The player’s choices are interpreted as preferences

and used for another step of user proﬁle induction.

The following picture illustrates different changes

of some user proﬁle in dependence on the observed

player’s behavior.

Figure 5: FELDER/SILVERMAN Theory Induction.

Assume the player did arrive at the scene denoted

by node 100 having a proﬁle in the background which

is shown by the topmost conﬁguration on display in

ﬁg. 5. When players prefer to write a message, pro-

ﬁles change to the one displayed in the middle. When

talking to the staff member at the map instead, the

proﬁles change to the one displayed at the bottom of

ﬁg. 5 because an “active” person tends to prefer con-

versation with others.

According to the user proﬁle, the system behaves

differently in the green nodes. For example, for a

player modeled as a “visual” person, as it is assumed

that such a person prefers visual representation to

text-based representation, the system shows more pic-

tures or videos for giving information to the player.

The visual appearance of storyboards supports di-

dactic design as well as goal-oriented adaptivity. The

location and distribution of branching points, where

theory induction is triggered, may easily be controlled

CSEDU2013-5thInternationalConferenceonComputerSupportedEducation

654

as well as the location and distribution of points where

the system behaves adaptively. By means of direct

modiﬁcations in the storyboard, alternatives may be

easily checked.

Storyboards form a suitable basis for interdisci-

plinary discourse, because domain specialists, educa-

tional specialists, and system developers may take the

same document as a basis for inspection, for asking

question, for making proposals, and the like.

Note that the RDF storyboard is not only a speci-

ﬁcation of forthcoming playful interactions, but at the

same time an implementation of the system’s part in

the interaction. This system is reading in the story-

board and acting accordingly. This bears potentials

for further extensions of adaptive behavior in practice.

6 CONCLUSIONS

The project TRAST reported in the present paper is a

proper application case of game based learning in use

for quite serious purposes of learning and training.

When projects of computer supported education

are under development, a large number of aspects

have to taken into account and a wide spectrum of

needs and desires have to be satisﬁed. There arises

abundant evidence for the need of planning.

Storyboarding is the methodology advocated to

plan the rich manifold of potential human learners’

experiences.

In particular, the authors advocate throughout the

present paper the position that the developed story-

boards are not only design documents, but may serve

as components of the digital system anticipated.

If this is the case, the crucial problem of trans-

forming storyboards into some semantically correct

implementation disappears. The digital game system

is reading the storyboard and is interpreting the ﬂow

of control and data speciﬁed by means of the graph

structure. Digital storyboarding is advantageous.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Part of the present work has been supported by the

German Federal Ofﬁce of Civil Protection and Disas-

ter Assistance (BBK).

REFERENCES

Brusilovsky, P. (1996). Methods and techniques of adap-

tive hypermedia. User Modeling and User Adapted

Interaction, 6(2-3):87–129.

Brusilovsky, P. (2001). Adaptive hypermedia. User Model-

ing and User Adapted Interaction, 11:87–110.

Brusilovsky, P. and Maybury, M. T. (2003). From adaptive

hypermedia to the adaptive web. Communications of

the ACM, 45(5):30–33.

Carey, S. (1985). Conceptual Change in Childhood. Cam-

bridge, MA, USA: The MIT Press.

Carey, S. (2000). Science education as conceptual

change. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychol-

ogy, 21:13–19.

Colasante, M. and Lang, J. (2012). Can a media annotation

tool enhance online engagement with learning? In

Helfert, M., Martins, M. J., and Cordeiro, J., editors,

4th International Conference on Computer Supported

Education (CSEDU 2012), April 16-18, 2012, Porto,

Portugal, volume 2, pages 455–464. SciTePress.

Felder, R. M. and Silverman, L. K. (1988). Learning and

teaching styles in engineering education. Engineering

Education, 78(7):674–681.

Henze, N. and Nejdl, W. (2004). A logical characterization

of adaptive educational hypermedia. New Review of

Hypermedia and Multimedia, 10(1):77–113.

Jantke, K. P. (2013). Digitale Assistenten f¨ur Sch¨uler und

Lehrer. In Thillm Jahrbuch 2013 (in print). Bad

Berka: Th¨uringer Institut f¨ur Lehrerfortbildung, Lehr-

planentwicklung und Medien.

Jantke, K. P. and Knauf, R. (2005). Didactic design

through storyboarding: Standard concepts for stan-

dard tools. In Baltes, B. R., Edwards, L., Galindo,

F., Hvorecky, J., Jantke, K. P., Jololian, L., Leith,

P., van der Merwe, A., Morison, J., Nejdl, W., Ra-

mamoorthy, C. V., Seker, R., Shaffer, B., Skliarova,

I., Sklyarov, V., and Waldron, J., editors, Proc. 4th

Intl. Symposium on Information and Communica-

tion Technologies, First Intl. Workshop on Dissemi-

nation of E-Learning Technologies and Applications

(DELTA), Cape Town, South Africa, January 3–6,

2005, pages 20–25. Computer Science Press, Trinity

College Dublin, Ireland.

Jantke, K. P. and Knauf, R. (2012). Taxonomic concepts for

storyboarding digital games for learning in context. In

Helfert, M., Martins, M. J., and Cordeiro, J., editors,

4th International Conference on Computer Supported

Education (CSEDU 2012), April 16-18, 2012, Porto,

Portugal, volume 2, pages 401–409. SciTePress.

Oppermann, R. (1965). Adaptive User Support: Ergonomic

Design of Manually and Automatically Adaptable

Software. Hillsdale, NJ, USA: Erlbaum.

Perrault, C. R., Allen, J. F., and Cohen, P. R. (1978). Speech

acts as a basis for understanding dialogue coher-

ence. Technical Report 78-5, University of Toronto,

Canada, Dept. Comp. Sci.

Thagard, P. (2012). The Cognitive Science of Science: Ex-

planation, Discovery, and Cognitive Change. Cam-

bridge, MA, USA: The MIT Press.

StoryboardingSeriousGamesforLarge-scaleTrainingApplications

655