Collaborative Indicators in Learning Games: An Immersive Factor

International audienceThe work reported here takes place in the educational domain. We propose an approach of a learning environment based on a graphical representation of a course: a pedagogical dungeon equipped with the capacity for collaboration in certain activities. The emergence of online multiplayer games led us to apply the metaphor of exploring a virtual world, a dungeon, where each student embarks on a quest in order to collect knowledge related to a learning activity. In the dungeon, each room represents a place, sometimes a collaborative place, where students are supposed to acquire a particular concept. Although the students appreciate this approach, there is an obvious need for awareness, especially for the teacher. Indeed, the teacher needs to adapt his/her pedagogical session according to what is going on during the collaborative activity. We thus need to provide the teacher with collaborative indicators, and this information must be part of the game in order to keep the immersion of the teacher inside the game. In this paper, we focus especially on the need for collaborative indicators concerning both the knowledge (success and failure for sub activities) and the behaviour (talkative, cooperative) of the different students during the pedagogical session. In the first part, we describe deal with the support of the observation task for the teacher during a learning session. We then propose a classification of collaborative indicators as well as concrete examples from a real experiment achieved with students in our University. For immersion purposes, we represente these indicators by particular symbols such as coloured “auras” inserted inside the game itself