Abstract
Telling stories and playing games are important for the development of children language, cognitive and social skills. Using robots as characters of digital stories and agents of embodied cognition will further advance children’s creativity, teamwork and other 21st century skills. Additional use of gamification techniques improves emotional engagement and helps young children more easily grasp abstract concepts.
In this study we describe a general framework for designing robotics-based board games for primary school students, aiming at the assimilation of abstract concepts. The purpose of such games is to provide additional environments promoting children’s personal development and improving their socialization skills. The case study in this paper specifically relates to human rights, both as a general concept and as a set of principles helping to prevent inappropriate behavior in different social situations. In this case, having a general framework simplifies the board game design procedure, allowing focusing on a particular set of human rights (or more generally, any other abstract concepts) in everyday life situations.
Field-testing observation indicates that students enjoy this way of learning. Use of robots as their embodied external agents helped students to learn behavior principles. We propose that further field studies should assess and measure long term learning benefits, compared to appropriate control groups.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
An example of game storyline is on this link: http://bit.ly/2FuvzNw.
References
Osaka, H.: Human Rights Education in the Northeast Asian School Systems: Resource Material, Takada (2013)
White, M., Epston, D.: Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends. W.W. Norton, New York (1990)
Sharda, N.: Applying movement oriented design to create educational stories. Int. J. Learn. 13(12), 177–184 (2007)
Vivitsou, M.: Digital storytelling in teaching and research. In: Natnall, A., Multisilta, J. (eds.) Encyclopedia of Education and Information Technologies, Springer (2018)
Dogan, B.: Educational uses of digital storytelling: research results of an online digital storytelling contests. In: Conference: Proceedings of Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference (2010)
Robin, B.: The effective uses of digital storytelling as a teaching and learning tool. In: Flood, J., Heath, S., Lapp, D. (eds.) Handbook of Research on Teaching Literacy through the Communicative and Visual Arts, no. 2, pp. 429–440. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, New York (2008)
Sadik, A.: Digital storytelling: a meaningful integrated approach for engaged student learning. Educ. Technol. Res. 56, 487–506 (2008)
Yuksel, P., Robin, B. McNeil, S.: Educational uses of digital storytelling all around the world. In: Koehler, M., Mishra, P. (eds.) Proceedings of SITE 2011–Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference, Nashville, Tennessee, USA, pp. 1264–1271. Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE) (2011)
Smeda, N., Dakich, E., Sharda, N.: The effectiveness of digital storytelling in the classrooms: a comprehensive study. Smart Learn. Environ. 1, 6 (2014)
Ohler, J.: Digital storytelling in the classroom. Corwin Press, Thousand Oaks (2008)
Stolz, S.A.: Embodied learning. Educ. Phil. Theo. 47(5), 474–487 (2015)
Guhe, M., Pease, A., Smaill, A.: A cognitive model of discovering commutativity. In: Taatgen, N., van Rijn, H. (Eds.) CogSci 2009 Proceedings, pp. 727–732. Cognitive Science Society (2009)
Alibali, M.W., Nathan, M.J.: Embodiment in mathematics teaching and learning: evidence from learners’ and teachers’ gestures. J. Learn. Sci. 21(2), 247–286 (2012)
Madden, J.J., Lakoff, G., Núñez, R.E.: Where mathematics comes from: how the embodied mind brings mathematics into being. Am. Math. Monthly 109(7), 1182 (2002)
Han, I.: Embodiment: a new perspective for evaluating physicality in learning. J. Educ. Comput. Res. 49(1), 41–59 (2013)
Kopcha, T.J., McGregor, J., Shin, S., Qian, Y., Choi, J., Hill, R., Mativo, J., Choi, I.: Developing an integrative STEM curriculum for robotics education through educational design research. J. Form. Des. Learn. 1(1), 31–44 (2017)
Gabriel, S.: How to analyze the potential of digital games for human rights education. Revista Lusófona de Educação 41, 29–43 (2018)
Mullins, J.K., Sabherwal, R.: Beyond enjoyment: a cognitive-emotional perspective of gamification. In: Conference: 51st Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (2018)
Swain, C.: Designing games to effect social change. situated play. In: Proceedings of DiGRA 2007 Conference (2007)
Wang, S., Hung, I., Lin, L., Chen, N.: On the design of embodiment-based gamification activities for learning fundamental projectile motion (2015)
Howison, M., Trninic, D., Reinholz, D., Abrahamson, D.: The mathematical imagery trainer-from embodied interaction to conceptual learning. In: Fitzpatrick, G., Gutwin, C., Begole, B., Kellogg, W.A., Tan, D. (eds.) Proceedings of ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2011), pp. 1989–1998. Association for Computing Machinery. ACM (2011)
Woods, S.: Eurogames - The Design, Culture and Play of Modern European Board Games. Mc Farland & Company Inc, Publishers (2012). ISBN 978-0-7864-6797-6
Salen, K., Zimmerman, E.: Rules of Play – Game Design Fundamentals. MIT Press (2003). ISBN 978-0-2622-4045-1
Parlett, D.: The Oxford History of Board Games. Oxford University Press (1999). ISBN 978-0-1921-2998-7
Gupta, A., Matthews, J.: Twilight Struggle. Board game by GMT Games (2005)
Knemeyer, D.: Tesla vs Edison: War of Currents. Board game by Artana (2015)
Cruz-Diaz, M., Dionisio, A.: Ars Universalis. Board game by Meridiano 6 (2015)
Coveyou, J.: Cytosis: A Cell Biology Board Game. Board game by Genius Games (2017)
Järvinen, A.: Games without frontiers: theories and methods for games studies and design. PhD Thesis, University of Tampere (Finland) (2009). ISBN 978-951-44-7252-7
Adams, E., Dormans, J.: Game Mechanics - Advanced Game Design. New Riders Games (2012). ISBN 978-0-321-82027-3
Berlinger, Y.: The Modern Eurogame Revolution. In: Paper presented at the Board Game Studies Colloquia XII, Jerusalem (2009)
GameDesigning. Beginner’s Guide to Game Mechanics. https://www.gamedesigning.org/learn/basic-game-mechanics. Accessed 7 Jan 2020
Anderson, T., Shattuck, J.: Design-based research: a decade of progress in education research? Educ. Res. 41(1), 16–25 (2012)
Brown, A.: Design experiments: theoretical and methodological challenges in creating complex interventions in classroom settings. J. Learn. Sci. 2(2), 141–178 (1992)
Boyer, D.M., Akcaoglu, M., Pernsteiner, S.: Connecting game and instructional design through development. In: Baek, Y. (ed.) Game-Based Learning: Theory, Strategies and Performance Outcomes, Hauppauge, New York, pp. 67–82. Nova Science Publishers (2017)
Sullivan, A., Salter, A.: A taxonomy of narrative-centric board and card games. In: Proceedings of FDG 2017, Hyannis, MA, USA (2017). https://doi.org/10.1145/3102071.3102100
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Leoste, J. et al. (2021). Using Robots for Digital Storytelling. A Game Design Framework for Teaching Human Rights to Primary School Students. In: Lepuschitz, W., Merdan, M., Koppensteiner, G., Balogh, R., Obdržálek, D. (eds) Robotics in Education. RiE 2020. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 1316. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67411-3_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67411-3_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-67410-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-67411-3
eBook Packages: Intelligent Technologies and RoboticsIntelligent Technologies and Robotics (R0)