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ON SERIOUS GAMES, GAMIFICATION, & DIGITAL GAME-BASED LEARNING: Foreign Language Learning in the Digital Age

COMITÉ CIENTÍFICO DE LA EDITORIAL TIRANT HUMANIDADES Catedrático de Teoría de la Literatura y de la Literatura Comparada Universitat de València Catedrático de Ciencia Política y de la Administración de la Facultad de Ciencias Políticas y Sociología de la Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia Catedrática de Lengua Española Universitat de València Catedrático de Teoría e Historia de la Educación Universitat de València Catedrático de Ciencia Política y de la Administración Universitat de València Catedrático de Geografía Humana Universitat de València Director de la Cátedra de Teología y Ciencias de las Religiones Universidad Carlos III de Madrid

Procedimiento de selección de originales, ver página web: www.tirant.net/index.php/editorial/procedimiento-de-seleccion-de-originales

ON SERIOUS GAMES, GAMIFICATION, & DIGITAL GAME-BASED LEARNING: Foreign Language Learning in the Digital Age

RICARDO CASAÑ-PITARCH

tirant humanidades Valencia, 2022

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© TIRANT LO BLANCH EDITA: TIRANT LO BLANCH C/ Artes Gráficas, 14 - 46010 - Valencia TELFS.: 96/361 00 48 - 50 FAX: 96/369 41 51 Email:tlb@tirant.com www.tirant.com Librería virtual: www.tirant.es DEPÓSITO LEGAL: V-1741-2022 ISBN: 978-84-19286-23-9 MAQUETA: Disset Ediciones Si tiene alguna queja o sugerencia, envíenos un mail a: atencioncliente@tirant.com. En caso de no ser atendida su sugerencia, por favor, lea en www.tirant.net/index.php/empresa/politicas-de-empresa nuestro procedimiento de quejas. Responsabilidad Social Corporativa: http://www.tirant.net/Docs/RSCTirant.pdf

ÍNDICE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT.........................................................................

INTRODUCTION...................................................................................

Chapter 1 AN INTRODUCTION TO EDUCATION IN THE XXI CENTURY: A NEW APPROACH....................................................................................

Chapter 2 CONVENTIONAL AND SERIOUS GAMES IN THE CLASSROOM.....

Chapter 3 LANGUAGE TEACHING THROUGH THE GAME-BASED APPROACH..................................................................................................

Chapter 4 GAMIFICATION AND TEACHING FOREIGN LANGUAGES..............

CONCLUSION........................................................................................

BRIEF BIO................................................................................................

101

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

The publication of this book is part of a project funded by the Autonomous Government of the Valencian Community (Spain), Subvencions a grups d’investigació emergent, and whose reference number is GV/2021/035.

INTRODUCTION

The digital revolution in which society is currently immersed because of the constant technological advances has had a significant impact in different areas such as on commercial, labor, educational and personal. In this sense, education is evolving fast, and technology has made this process increasingly faster. The application of the gamebased approach in the classroom is no longer a novelty at present, as some previous authors proposed it in the past (Abt, 1970). Furthermore, the possibility of using video games for educational purposes had already been discussed in the 1980s (Gagnon, 1985; Malone, 1981; Silvern, 1986). However, the technology at that time was not sufficient, and what some authors dreamed of sounded like a utopia. However, the technological revolution in the 21st Century has made it possible that digital resources can be implemented in the classroom, including video games and other related software. At present, the game-based approach, gamification, and the use of video games in the foreign language classroom and other areas is a common practice among educators at different levels. In addition, other researchers have published their studies on the efficiency and benefits of using these resources in the classroom (Calvo‐Ferrer, 2017; Casañ-Pitarch, 2018; Casañ-Pitarch, & Gong, 2021; Dubreil, 2020; Griffiths, 2002; Janebi Enayat, & Haghighatpasand, 2019). Therefore, the purpose of this book is to explain the theoretical principles on the use of games in the classroom, focusing on the game-based approach, gamification, and the use of video games in the foreign language classroom. This book has been divided into four chapters before the conclusion. The first chapter, entitled “An Introduction to Education in the XXI Century: A New Approach,” explains the evolution of technology since the invention of the first computer. It begins with the origin of the digital age, focusing on the first computers, their operating systems, and the creation of the Internet. The following section describes

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the second part of the technological revolution, which mainly refers to the creation of mobile devices, remote Internet connections, and the market of digital apps. It also introduces the concept of the digital native, distinguishing it from the digital immigrant. These concepts refer to the people who were born with the technology and those who integrated it as it was being created. This generational gap made the present teachers learn in a different way in comparison with the students. In this sense, motivation plays an important role among digital natives, as their lives move around using technology, which also causes dependence on it. This chapter ends with a discussion on how to regularize the use of digital devices in the classrooms to make proper use of them. The second chapter, “Conventional and Serious Games in the Classroom”, introduces these two concepts. The chapter starts with a presentation of the history of games and video games. In this sense, the game should be understood as a human instinct, from which people learn by imitating in a given context with specific rules and objectives that need to be fulfilled. The following part explains the concepts of conventional games and serious games. Both of them can teach, as films or books also do; however, whereas serious games have been designed to teach some specific content with intentionality, conventional games aim at promoting entertainment, and the learning is unintentional. At last, this chapter also discusses how to implement both conventional and serious games in the classroom, including possibilities and limitations. The third chapter, “Language Teaching through the Game-Based Approach”, focuses on explaining the theoretical principles of the game-based approach in the language classroom. This chapter starts with an introduction to the theoretical principles of the game-based approach, following the characteristics that other researchers had previously appointed. In the second part of this chapter, some theoretical principles are introduced to complete previous research. In this case, the principles of the game-based approach are complemented along with the process of learning and acquisition of foreign languages. To this purpose, the taxonomy of Krathwohl and Anderson (2001) about learning cognitive skills is used to explain the different stages of the learning and acquisition process. In this sense, students shall start

Introduction

with an input stage, continue with the processing of the new information, and at last culminate it with the output stage. The fourth chapter, “Gamification and Teaching Foreign Languages”, deals with the process of gamification. This chapter is divided into five sections. It starts with a definition of gamification. The following section complements the first with the introduction of some gamification models, and it also introduces a self-created model. This model suggests the element and the steps to take in order to gamify any teaching content. Additionally, this chapter also discusses the importance of storytelling to gamify content. Storytelling gives a sense of linearity to the gamified content provided to the students, introducing a plot with characters, objectives, and leading the students towards the completion of the activity with an ending. Next, the following subsection introduces a taxonomy of activities to gamify lessons in the foreign language classroom. This chapter ends with some tips to create a gamified teaching unit. To conclude, this book is a helpful guide for those who aim at starting on gamification and the use of games and video games in the foreign language classroom. The topics discussed in this book have increasingly become popular in the last years as the use of games has been reported to be beneficial for students in terms of both learning and motivation. Each of the four chapters presented in this book shows a different perspective on the use of games in the foreign language classroom, and at the same time, they are complementary and presented from a theoretical perspective. I trust that this work will inspire and help further research related to the use of games and video games in the foreign language classroom.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Abt, C. (1970). Serious Games. The Viking Anderson, L. W., & Krathwohl, D. (2001). A Taxonomy for learning, teaching and assessing: a revision of Bloom’s taxonomy of educational objectives. Longman. Calvo‐Ferrer, J. R. (2017). Educational games as stand‐alone learning tools and their motivational effect on L 2 vocabulary acquisition and perceived

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learning gains. British Journal of Educational Technology, 48(2), 264278. Casañ-Pitarch, R. (2018). An approach to digital game-based learning: Video-games principles and applications in foreign language learning. Journal of Language Teaching and Research, 9(6), 1147-1159. Casañ-Pitarch, R., & Gong, J. (2021). Testing ImmerseMe with Chinese students: acquisition of foreign language forms and vocabulary in Spanish. Language Learning in Higher Education, 11(1), 219-233. Dubreil, S. (2020). Using games for language learning in the age of social distancing. Foreign language annals, 53(2), 250-259. Gagnon, D. (1985). Videogames and spatial skills: An exploratory study. ECTJ, 33(4), 263-275. Griffiths, M. (2002). The educational benefits of video games. Education and health, 20(3), 47-51. Janebi Enayat, M., & Haghighatpasand, M. (2019). Exploiting adventure video games for second language vocabulary recall: a mixed-methods study. Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching, 13(1), 61-75. Malone, T. W. (1981). What makes things fun to learn? A study of intrinsically motivating computer games. Pipeline, 6(2), 50-51. Silvern, S. B. (1986). Classroom Use of Videogames. Educational Research Quarterly, 10(1), 10-16.

Chapter 1

AN INTRODUCTION TO EDUCATION IN THE XXI CENTURY: A NEW APPROACH

1.1. THE BORN OF THE DIGITAL AGE The term digital has recently been used to name a period, just as it happened with other events or processes throughout our history, for example, the industrial and the bronze ages. In this case, the word digital implies a concept related to the fingers or what is done with them. From a technological perspective, digital would mean that the fingers are used to introduce data to a machine, which in turn is capable of processing and executing it. In this sense, the digital age begins with the beginning of computerized systems. The start of this age was a slow process during the 20th Century. Without an exact date determining the beginning of this era, the invention of the Z1 computer by the German Konrad Zuse in 1936 could be taken as a reference. This computer worked electro-mechanically, allowed the completion of mathematical calculations, and was capable of automating processes through electrical relays. Other sources indicate that the beginning of the digital age is associated with the invention of Tommy Flowers’ Colossus in 1943, the first electrically programmable computer. The function of this machine was to help the British government decipher messages encrypted by the German government. In the same decade, in 1946, the ENIAC computer (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator) was created. It is considered the first digital computer, and its function was to solve mathematical problems and equations. Its inventors were J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly from the University of Pennsylvania, who founded the first computer company in 1949: the Electronic Controls Company.

Ricardo Casañ-Pitarch

After this last event, the computer manufacturing industry began to function for commercial purposes, and, as a result, other entrepreneurs followed this business model and created other companies with the same purpose. This business and commercial competition caused computer technology to emerge and develop more rapidly. In 1955, the Random Access Memory (RAM) was incorporated for the first time into a computer (Whirlwind Machine); and in 1956, the company Digital Equipment Corporation began to use transistors in their equipment. In 1971, the company Intel launched the first computer with a micro-processor, named Intel 4004. During these years, other computers or machines had such functions as the Programma 101, invented by Pier Luigi Perotto (Olivetti) in 1964. It was considered the first desktop computer, and it was also sold on a large commercial scale; the function of this computer was to perform complex mathematical calculations such as square roots, absolute value, and the fractional part, among others, in addition to printing on paper. In 1978, the MacIntosh Company released its Apple II, while in 1981, IBM released its IBM PC. These were considered the first personal computers, and both could be considered the forerunners of the modern desktop computers. After this release, the tough competition began, especially between IBM and MacIntosh, not only in terms of the quality of the hardware and software of their equipment but also the operating systems began to be improved, including a graphical interface. Both the Apple II and the IBM PC operating system worked with DOS (Disk Operating System), which is a closed source development model, and its graphical interface was based on command lines with ASCII characters. The origin of DOS comes after others such as CP/M, Multics or UNIX, which were also executed with a closed code; they had the same interface but used a more complex programming language. Both the pioneers and the DOS systems required the user to know how their specific code language worked to perform actions such as copy-paste, run a program, or access a folder with files, among many others. In 1984, the MacIntosh company revolutionized the market again with a new operating system called MacIntosh 128k, also known as Mac OS, which included a graphical interface with control from the mouse and therefore more user-friendly. This type of interface would allow the users to interact with computers through graphical icons and

An Introduction to Education in the XXI Century: A New Approach

visual indicators instead of previous interfaces that worked through text-based commands. A year later, the Microsoft company launched Windows, its operating system with a graphical interface and similar to the MacIntosh model. Despite their significant evolution from the pioneers to the present operating systems and some considerable technical differences, the current operating systems of the same companies should be included in the same category in terms of a graphical interface, unlike the DOS operating systems that required knowing their language-specific command. As mentioned, this evolution of operating systems made the use of the computer easier for the public and those who were not experts in computer languages. As a result, these facts increased their demand significantly, and at the end of the decade of the 1990s, most households in North America and Europe owned at least one desktop computer. However, computers’ development and evolution and operating systems were not the only reason for this change. Instead, the emergence of the Internet revolutionized the communications system, and the computer became the means by which people performed different daily actions. As it happened with computers and their operating systems, the settlement of computers at homes was a slow process that began in 1958 when the BELL Company managed to transmit data between two computers through a conventional telephone network. In 1961, Leonard Kleinrock developed the packet switching theory that suggested the possibility of transmitting data through a connected network between computers, which was put into practice in 1965 when a TX2 computer in Massachusetts was connected to a Q-32 in California through a low-speed dial-up telephone line. This fact caught the attention of the US defense service, and in 1969 they managed to connect four computers from four universities to transfer military information. These universities were California-Los Angeles, California-Santa Barbara, Utah, and the Stanford Research Institute. This network called Arpanet broadened its expansion in the following years, reaching 24 computers in 1971, 213 computers in 1981, and 500 in 1983. During this period, not only did the number of connected computers increased, but the technology evolved remarkably. For example, in 1972, the InterNetworking Working Group was founded,

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the organization in charge of managing the Internet, and whose first foreign members to join were the United Kingdom and Norway. The same year Tomlinson invented the electronic mail, and a year later, in 1973, the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) was created, which allowed sending images, videos, and audio through the network. A decade later, the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP) emerged, and others that are also very common in today’s computing, such as POP, and HTTP. During this decade, the number of computers connected to the Arpanet reached 100,000 in 1989. The great communications revolution began in 1991 with creating a global computer network, whose name was World Wide Web. Its promoter was Time Berns Lee, and the function of this open network was to distribute interconnected and accessible hypertext or hypermedia documents via the Internet. In this way, the users could view websites made up of web pages containing text, images, videos, or other multimedia content and navigate through those pages using hyperlinks. This opening to the world caused households worldwide to hire this service. This fact would lead to the connection between networks that we use today and that allows us to be connected both synchronously and asynchronously, regardless of geography, and have access to an almost infinite repertoire of information and services.

1.2. THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION OF THE 21ST CENTURY AND ITS NATIVES The creation and evolution of computers during the 20th Century dramatically changed communication, daily habits, and the lifestyle of individuals worldwide (Camuñas-Mesa, Linares-Barranco, & Serrano-Gotarredona, 2019; Noelle-Neumann, 1993; Von Neumann, 1993). This first part of the digital revolution caused significant changes in communicating and interacting with people and their relationships. In doing and conducting business, leisure, education, safety, and health were revolutionized, among many other aspects of everyday life. In this sense, technology has completely changed the world and its people (Bensaude-Vincent, Boudia, & Sato, 2022). In addition, one of the characteristics of computer technology is that it has not stopped or slowed down its evolution, but rather it has increased its speed and has

An Introduction to Education in the XXI Century: A New Approach

dramatically improved its power and the general quality of its services. The first factor of this industrial revolution was the creation of a wireless Internet connection network (Wi-Fi), whose evolution has led to users accessing the Internet practically anywhere in the world without even having a Wireless Router at a close distance. This fact implies that any individual with a computerized device can access the information on the network and communicate and exchange information with people thousands of kilometers away through multimedia data of any kind (Almazyad & Loiacono, 2019; Marshall, 2016). Secondly, the new concepts of the market about the design and creation of computerized applications and their distribution and consumption have changed radically (Pencarelli, 2020; Werthner, et al., 2015). This fact has been possible thanks to new and more powerful operating systems adapted to the needs of the new equipment and distribution markets. In this sense, applications are no longer purchased in a physical store as in the past, but virtually. In addition, prices have been reduced considerably because the market has designed a new line of business management for computer applications. This business model offers different ways to charge for a product beyond the more traditional purchase-sale transaction between two parties. Today, there are other options in which investors earn money with their applications such as Ads per play (watch ads for playing), offering free versions with Premium options that require payment, free demos to try to convince the user to buy the product or popularize an application as a start-up so that a higher-level company buys it, among others (Clark, 2014; Fuchs, 2014). The third relevant aspect of this second digital revolution is reducing the physical size of computer equipment, drastically decreasing (Bulus, 2020; Casañ-Pitarch, 2018a; Mutiaraningrum, & Nugroho, 2021). It shall be acknowledged that the first computers occupied the space of a room, and this contrasts with the current size of a Smartphone or Tablet, and laptop computers. This fact implies the portability of personal and individual equipment and that they may be non-transferable, which increases the control, security, and confidentiality of the information that the users store. In short, these three exposed facts seem to have just revolutionized the digital age for the moment. As commented in this

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chapter, individuals’ lives revolve around digital technology in which many daily actions are computerized directly or indirectly. It could be said that this technology has made people’s lives easier and that it has also evolved in many aspects (education, health, economy, communication). However, this rapid evolution in the world caused a social distinction between ages, on the one hand, between those born before this second digital revolution and those born with or after it. The first group is known as digital immigrants and the second as digital natives. Prensky (2001a) introduced first and defined the term digital native as those born with the digital technology described in this document have constantly been exposed to it and have been learning to use it as they have grown and developed their physical and cognitive abilities. On the contrary, the digital immigrant has been gradually introducing and learning the use of the technology as it has been discovered. According to this definition, the first digital natives would be, in general, those born after the decade of 2000s, while the further they moved away from this date of birth, the more they would distance themselves from this generation in terms of understanding and seeing different aspects of contemporary daily life. Among other characteristics, Prensky (2004) suggested that Digital Natives are characterized by the fact that they do some daily actions differently in comparison to their predecessors; among others, they communicate, share, buy and sell, meet, collect, coordinate, evaluate, play, learn, search, analyze, report, and socialize differently. As a result of these facts, there is currently a much more aggravated generational gap between teachers and students than those born and educated in times prior to this age and even during the first stage of the digital age. This justification would be based on the fact that the education received by the teachers at their time as students would be very different from that of the student, and in many cases would cause difficulties in understanding the student emotionally and the effectiveness of their teaching strategies and methods could also be negatively affected. Prensky (2001b) justified these changes with bio-psychological reasons. He appointed the importance of stimulation as the response to change brain structures, and consequently, it affects the way people think. Besides, he also referred to the term malleability as another