Graz (Austria):
Seven European research partners met at the University
Graz to kick off the European FP7 research project
"80days - Around an Inspiring Virtual Learning
World in Eighty Days”; a pathfinder project
exploring for new ways in Digital Educational Gaming.
Their goal: Provide Europe with new opportunities
how to explore gaming for a better and more efficient
learning.
key message
If one analyses long enough the connection between
games and learning, the surprising conclusion is that
games organise learning better than traditional educational
methods that use books or lectures. Furthermore, since
the 1930s researchers have concluded that learning
itself is a reward by nature for primates, like us
humans, and sufficient reward to keep us on a life
long learning track. Thus, we come to a point where
two critical questions have to be asked. First: How
did we manage during our long evolutionary development
to make learning unpleasant enough to transfer it
from the fun and pleasure area of our emotional cognition,
to the area of work and hardship? And second: Why
not learn how to learn from games? In April 2008,
twenty specialists from around Europe met in Graz
to examine question number two in particular, and
explore how computer games could revoke this unproductive
development in human evolution? These are the research
questions that the European Research project “80days
- Around an inspiring virtual learning world in eighty
days” is trying to answer. Making learning more
efficient and more fun, through the right use of computer
games, is the learning path the project itself will
explore in order to maintain Europe at the world’s
top level of educational best practice.
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What’s
the goal of the project?
In a few simple words: Learning by playing and having
fun. If we manage to synchronise playing with learning,
we can exploit the highly intrinsic motivation of
humans to play (rather than learning in terms of working)
for a significantly improved learning efficiency.
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What’s
behind such simple words to make it really happen?
(1) Hard and long lasting research work of a collaborative
pan-European nature. (2) Integrating the complementary
expertises, proven experiences and one common spirit
of seven European organisations from Austria, Switzerland,
Germany, Italy, Ireland and the United Kingdom. (3)
A thirty month research and development project, chosen
along with five partner projects, out of more than
one hundred ambitious applications to the European
Commission and its Learning and Cultural Heritage
Unit.
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What’s
in the 80Days Project?
The project is inspired by and builds on Jules Verne’s
famous novel “Around the world in eighty days”.
It is as an evergreen storyline that has fascinated
readers and film makers for 135 years since the book
was first published under its French tile (Le tour
du monde en quatre-vingts jours). This project’s
ambition is to integrate intelligent and pedagogically
proven personalisation, together with interactive
and individual storytelling, into a computer or console
based game.
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Why is this
combination of such importance?
This combination ensures two decisive key elements:
First, the player does not know he is a learner (so
he doesn’t feel unpleasant when working) and
second, he can be accompanied by pedagogical intelligence
throughout the gameplay.
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What’s
the result of the project?
80Days will provide Europe with a prototype of an
innovative and advanced methodological and technological
framework for developing successful educational games.
This will be demonstrated by a geography game prototype
that realises gaming and learning scenarios inspired
by Jules Verne’s “Around the world in
eighty days”, and a storyline that carries the
learning scenarios. The goal is a proof of concept
in knowledge transfer and understanding of geographic
learning content; and a proof of how much more fun
this is to the user
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European strategy of
gaining and defending world leadership in research
domains of significance.
The European Commission regards this project as one
of her flagships in a research policy competing against
Asia and the U.S. to find the optimum way to organise
education and learning. The project is thus a consequent
continuation of the European long term strategy in
research into technology enhanced learning (TEL).
In particular it is regarded as the Framework Programme
Seven continuation of the Framework Programme Six
action “ELEKTRA – Enhanced Learning Experience
and Knowledge TRAnsfer” (www.elektra-project.org),
which finished in February 2008 to great commendations
from the European Commission’s reviewing experts.
80Days is committed to build on ELEKTRA’s research
results (thus this project has unrestricted access
to all of ELEKTRA’s databases and contains members
of the original ELEKTRA team) as well as to explore
the paths in technology enhanced learning that ELEKTRA
has yet to trespass.
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