We’re delighted to share the news that not one, but two of our projects have won awards in two different categories at this year’s Gamification Awards: Software and Gamification in Education and Learning. The 2020 Gamification Awards recognise excellence in many areas of gamification including software, education, healthcare, HR, marketing, and sustainability, and colleagues from the DMLL (and of course their project partners) have been recognised twice this year.
The Software Award Winner: Beaconing
Our first award was in the Software category in recognition for the Beaconing Project. Beaconing, funded by the European Commission Horizon 2020 programme, investigated gamified approaches for digitally enabling play-learn in everyday spaces that foster cross-subject learning. The project produced a tool that enables teachers to author gamified and pervasive lesson plans. This has opened up opportunities for teachers to experiment with new ways of designing and delivering their content, and to track the learning achieved beyond the formal setting of classroom teaching.
The platform is currently being accessed by more than 6000 users in school and universities across Europe.
According to Sylvester Arnab, Applied Innovation Lead here at the DMLL, the impact of the project has been to demonstrate that the priority for technology-enhanced innovation should be with the teachers on the frontline of education, inline with the UNESCO emphasis on the need of high-quality teachers in high-quality education. Working with teachers has been vital in discovering the differing use cases for learners. Additionally, the team found that there was huge interest and engagement from primary, secondary, further and higher education learners using the platform.
Here is what the judges had to say about Beaconing:
This project I love because it has a purpose. Teaching content has not changed in ages. Kids take it for granted what they are learning and how they are being taught. Adding gamification in such a clever way to change education being taught in schools is exemplary.
Mac Karlekar
Creating an ecosystem that can be used all around the world , with a variety of game elements that is customisable with add-ons that teachers can use, edit & scale-able is brilliant. Gamtastically Created!!
Sandra Abadir
An exceptional project that has resulted in a valuable platform for educators.
Margio Raftopoulos
“The current plan” for Beaconing, explains Sylvester, “is to repackage the software based on our business model, and create a marketplace for new contents to be delivered, purchased and downloaded. The business model is exploiting the modularity of the platform that will allow third parties to provide new resources such as meta game plot narratives and also the mini-games. We are currently in the process of setting up a start up to focus on this business model.”
The Gamification in Education Winner: GameChangers
Our other award was in the Gamification in Education and Learning category in recognition for the GameChangers project. GameChangers focuses on the design and implementation of playful learning experiences in everyday academic contexts. It’s offered as an open design course as well as a community for innovative educators all over the world. GameChangers has also recently received recognition from the UKRI Global Challenge Research Fund to investigate the impact of playful and gameful pedagogy in transformative education towards the development of social resilience in South East Asia.
Educators in remote communities in Malaysia have been able to use the GameChangers course material to co-create playful learning experiences suitable to their own context, and the game-based learning approach continues to have an impact today.
Here’s what some of the judges had to say about Game Changers:
Every aspect of the creative process and design has been so well thought through that it is impossible not to rate it 10/10.
Andrzej Marczews
Your approach to leverage the impact you are making by preparing tools for teachers to gamify their classes is impressive! I love the variety and diversity.
Arkadiusz Siechowicz
Great initiative, great execution, great design, looks like this project is well mastered and brings to tangible results.
Dominique Mangiatordi
In response, Sylvester (who was also the coordinator of the Game Changers Project) said “It is such an honour to have received this validation from esteemed judges who are active practitioners of gamification in various sectors. The recognition of the impact of GameChangers in education and learning on an international level will open up opportunities for exposure to our pedagogies, methodologies, outcomes and impact that could lead to further adoption and adaptation.”
In closing
We’re thankful to our staff, project partners and many others who have made success in these two awards possible.
If you’d like to know about either of these projects or anything else we’re working on here at Disruptive Media Learning Lab, we’d love to get in touch.
Just email dmll@coventry.ac.uk