The Geogames team at the University of Bamberg won the Best Short Paper Award with a submisson about “Spatial Choices in an Educational Geogame” at the VS-Games 2013 Conference.
The fifth International Conference on Games and Virtual Worlds for Serious Applications was hosted at Bournemouth University, UK between the 11th and the 13th of September 2013. The conference brings together researchers, developers from the industry, practitioners and decision-makers which aim to advance the state of the art in all of the technologies related to serious games.
The short paper by Dominik Kremer (member of the Geogames team), Christoph Schlieder (head of the Geogames team), Barbara Feulner and Urike Ohl (partner from Geography Didactics at the University of Augsburg) describes spatial choices of Geogame players in an educational context based on a study of GPS tracks collected during a playing event.
Spatial Choices in an Educational Geogame
Abstract. Geogames are location-based games played in outdoor environments. Many use a time out mechanism to balance game play. Little is known on how this affects player motivation in learning experiences. We report evidence from an explorative empirical study which indicates that the perceived choice of a player has impact on the enjoyment of the learning experience. We identify the spatial choices of the players from their GPS
tracks and describe game design decisions that affect the number of spatial choices available to a player.
