Research – FunHomework

Over the past few years, academics have witnessed an increasing amount of attention being accorded to games as learning tools. According to several researchers (de Freitas, 2006; Egenfeldt-Nielsen, 2011; Prensky, 2006) Serious Games (SGs) can assist learning by emerging as an alternate means of presenting instructions. The COVID-19 pandemic has further reinforced the significance of adopting a technological-approach for advancing the future of education, underscoring the need to bring transformational changes in teaching methods by making them more technology-centric.

Whilst SGs are increasingly gaining acceptance as a learning tool, their application in formal education remains rather limited. This can be ascribed to several factors that hinder games utilisation in every day classroom practice. In our research, we tried to investigate the various obstacles that restrict the adoption of game-based learning in schools, and in this regards, suggest an innovative solution “FunHomework” that overcome these challenges.

Overcome Challenges

In our study about the possibilities and limitations of utilising SGs in formal education, we managed to summarise the major challenges that hurdle the implementation of these games in schools.

Teachers’ Attitude: teachers play a key role in shaping and responding to the intricate contextual factors influencing the manner in which games are experienced across educational settings, their opinions on what SGs can possibly accomplish in educational settings would inexorably impact the decisions relating to when, how, and for what purposes they would be incorporated in classrooms. Therefore, we focused in FunHomework from the beginning on teachers and made sure that the platform matches the needs of teachers in addition to meeting their demands.

Relevance to Curriculum: the congruency of games with the curriculum plays an important role in the adoption decision. Most of the available games are aligned to certain curriculum, which make them static and decrease their chances to be used in different environment. When SGs that is designed for teaching some curriculum, they might not fit perfectly in another classroom that uses a completely or partially different curriculum. In FunHomework, the learning content of the games are set by teachers, therefore, the platform can be dynamically adapted to match any school curriculum.

Preparation Time: for teachers who are mostly stressed to finish their educational plans on time, such a laborious and lengthy job might decrease their enthusiasm towards implementing SGs in classrooms. Games mostly need complicated setup and installation which may also require teachers to have special IT skills. Therefore, we decided in FunHomework to use mobile apps for both teachers and students as they are simple to install without any special pervious knowledge. With their easily accessible mobile devices, teachers can use the user-friendly app TutorApp to create the learning content on their pace.

Students’ Assessment: in order to be efficiently used in formal education, games need to have some sort of evaluation that can help teachers assess their students. While most educational games lack student assessment, in FunHomework, we were keen to integrate evaluation and reward system in the games that enable teachers to track student performance and provide reports that can be used in the official student assessment.

So we at FunHomework intend by overcoming the previous barriers to ease the the utilisation of game-based learning in formal education by helping teachers implementing SGs in their classrooms and take advantage of the myriad benefits that games can bring to the educational process.

Publications

Here is a list of scientific research papers published so far about FunHomework

Supporting Teachers Adopting Game-based Learning in Formal Education: A Systematic Literature Review.
M Assaf, T Spil, G Bruinsma
2021 European Conference on Games Based Learning, 33-XXI

Teachers’ perceptions about using serious games in formal education in Jordan: Possibilities and limitations.
M Assaf, J Van Hillegersberg, T Spil, N Arikat
2019 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON), 436-441

A Platformer Serious Game with Dynamic Learning Contents
M Assaf
2017 Joint International Conference on Serious Games, 138-145