1st International Workshop on Pedagogically–driven Serious Games (PDSG 2012)

Technology Enhanced Learning is a promising area where Serious Games can have an impact beyond pure entertainment. Despite this potential, two issues stand in the way of achieving learning effects:

Few pedagogical theories are sufficiently formalized to allow implementation, therefore Serious Games seldom fully utilize the potential of pedagogy.
Even if present, pedagogical principles are implicitly implemented in the game story, structure, and characters, so that it is very difficult to test different theories on the same game mechanics. This results in low reusability and high costs of pedagogically-driven serious games that hinder their widespread use.

To address these issues, this workshop focuses on:

Formalizations of pedagogical theories potentially capable to drive the elements in a game's world, such as narrative and characters' behaviour.
Game frameworks based on storytelling, explicit game mechanics and intelligent agents that can provide a programmable environment to implement pedagogical formalizations

Expected participants and domains addressed

Participants to the workshop are researchers from the following areas:

Serious games and Technology-Enhanced Learning research in general
Agent technologies (especially in an interactive narrative context). Efforts in the Agent community such as Pogamut that connect agent platforms to games like Unreal Tournament can be the ground where these approaches can be implemented.
Storytelling and Interactive narrative research; narrative engines such as Brutus, Minstrel and Mexica.
Pedagogy theories/frameworks especially at a stage close to or already formalized.

Topics

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

Formalizations of pedagogical theories for the purposes of serious games
Game frameworks that provide a programmable environment to implement pedagogical formalizations, based on any of the following:

Storytelling
explicit game mechanics
intelligent agents

Approaches to modeling the interdependencies between pedagogy, storytelling and game mechanics in serious games and the translation of these interdependencies into agent behaviour
Empirical studies addressing the interdependencies between pedagogy, narrative and storytelling and game mechanics
Architectures for serious games that allow reusability
Existing programmable platforms, such as Pogamut, that connect agent platforms to games
Approaches to “programmable” narrative and storytelling in serious games
Approaches to “programmable” intelligent agents in serious games

Submissions
We encourage submissions of work that can be at all stages of development. Contributions are expected in the following form:

Full papers: max. 10 pages
Position/short papers: max. 4 pages
Demo papers: max. 4 pages

Proposals for demonstrations will be evaluated based on submitted demo papers. The following needs to be specified:

the purpose of the system to be demonstrated and how this is relevant to the theme of the workshop
the technology used
the duration of the demo (not exceeding 30 minutes)

Important Dates
Submission deadline: Mon 16-07-12

Paper Submission Procedure
Submissions will be handled by EasyChair at:

http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=pdsg2012

Submissions should use the Springer LNCS template. We encourage you to produce your submission using LaTeX as typesetting tool and the respective LaTeX template.

Accepted authors will be invited to extend their contributions for a special issue in the International Journal of Technology Enhanced Learning.
Contact
Contact chairs at: pdsg2012 __at__ easychair.org

Twitter: @PDSG2012

Organizers

Stefano Bocconi (Cyntelix and Vrije University Amsterdam, the Netherlands)
Ralf Klamma (RWTH Aachen, Germany);
Yulia Bachvarova (Cyntelix, the Netherlands)

Sections

Personal tools

1st International Workshop on Pedagogically–driven Serious Games (PDSG 2012)

Document Actions