GaLA

Overview

GaLA - Games and Learning Alliance is the Network of Excellence (NoE) on Serious Games and Game-Based Learning funded by the European Union in FP7 – IST ICT, Technology Enhanced Learning.

GaLA gathers the cutting-the-edge European Research & Development organizations on serious games and game based learning, involving 31 partners from 14 countries. Partnership involves universities, research centers, and developer and education industries.

Mission

The GaLA motivation stems from the acknowledgment of the potentiality of Serious Games (SGs) for education and training and the need to address the challenges of the main stakeholders of the SGs European landscape (users, researchers, developers/industry, educators).

GALA aims to shape the scientific community and build a European Virtual Research Centre aimed at gathering, integrating, harmonizing and coordinating research on SGs and disseminating knowledge, best practices and tools as a reference point at an international level. The other key focuses of the project are: the support to deployment in the actual educational and training settings; the fostering of innovation and knowledge transfer through research-business dialogue; the development high-quality didactics on SG by promoting and supporting courses at Master and PhD level.

Achievements by the ACIS Group

In the first project year (10/2010-09/2011), the ACIS Group has contributed expertise in several GaLA special interest groups (SIG) and technical committees (TC). These include the SIGs on Humanities and Heritage as well as on Personal and Social Learning & Ethics; additionally ACIS has contributed to research field reports for the TC on Personalization & Artificial Intelligence, the TC on Interoperability, as well as the TCs on Psychology and Neuroscience. In June 2011, we had a successful week at the 1st GaLA Alignment School which was held in Edinburgh, UK. We presented results of several previous projects of relevance to GaLA, giving lectures on Interactive Storytelling for Web 2.0 and Serious Games, and on Social Network Analysis and Serious Games. Additionally we demonstrated the YouTell interactive Web 2.0 storytelling platform that was developed by the ACIS Group.

During the second year of the project (10/2011-09/2012) we had four major work items. First, the collaboration in the TCs and SIGs carried fruits, and findings were submitted and published at different conferences (e.g. AIIDE 2012, VS-GAMES 2012) and journals in collaboration with consortium partners. Second, we had a successful presence at the 2nd GaLA Alignment School in Carcavelos, Portugal, chairing the workshop track on "Interactive Storytelling". The outcomes of the workshop track will be used e.g. as input to the new Serious Games MSc curriculum. Third, in collaboration with GaLA parnter Cyntelix we co-chaired a highly successful workshop on "Pedagogically Driven Serious Games” (PDSG 2012) at the 7th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL 2012) in Saarbrücken, Germany. The proceedings are available at http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-898/. Fourth, we made "Serious Games" the main theme of our High-tech Entrepreneurship and New Media lab for computer science master students in winter term 2011/12 at RWTH Aachen University. In this lab course our GaLA partner Cyntelix co-supervised one student team in an SG development project.

During the third project year (10/2012-09/2013), we took on several important roles in the network. We were moderating the creation of the "narrative in serious games" module in GALA’s reference MSc programme framework. We also participated in and delivered a workshop at the 1st GALA Summer School on Serious Games in Graz, Austria in early September 2013. Like the year before, we made "Serious Games and Gamification" the main theme of our High-tech Entrepreneurship and New Media lab course for computer science master students in winter term 2012/13 at RWTH Aachen University. The involvement in GALA also led to our involvement in a successful Tempus IV project bid on serious games. In this project, called SAGE ("Serious Games Pathway") we will support several Middle East universities in setting up serious games labs and serious games pathways in their IT curricula.

Publications

2017

• Ralf Klamma, Muhammad Abduh Arifin

  Gamification of Web-Based Learning Services

  Published in Ralf Klamma, Muhammad Abduh Arifin: Gamification of Web-Based Learning Services. ICWL 2017: 43-48

2015

• Frederick W. B. Li, Ralf Klamma, Mart Laanpere, Jun Zhang, Baltasar Fernández-Manjón, Rynson W. H. Lau

  Advances in Web-Based Learning -- ICWL 2015

  Published in 14th International Conference on Web-Based Learning (ICWL 2015), Guangzhou, China, November 5-8, 2015, Springer, LNCS 9412, 10.1007/978-3-319-25515-6

2014

• Manuel Ninaus, Silvia Erika Kober, Elisabeth V.C. Friedrich, Ian Dunwell, Sara de Freitas, Sylvester Arnab, Michela Ott, Milos Kravcik, Lim Theodore, Sandy Louchart, Francesco Bellotti, Anna Hannemann, Alasdair G. Thin

  Evaluating neurophysiological methods for monitoring brain activity in serious games and virtual environments: A review

• Michela Mortara, Chiara Eva Catalano, Giusy Fiucci, Michael Derntl

  Evaluating the Effectiveness of Serious Games for Cultural Awareness: The Icura User Study

  Published in Alessandro de Gloria (Ed.): Games and Learning Alliance - Second International Conference, GALA 2013, Paris, France, October 23-25, 2013, Revised Selected Papers. Lecture Notes in Computer Science vol. 8615.

• Elvira Popescu, Qing Li, Ralf Klamma, Marcus Specht, Howard Leung

  Guest Editorial: Advances in Technology-Enhanced Learning

  Published in Computer Science and Information Systems 11(1):ix-xi, 2014

• Roland Klemke, Milos Kravcik, Felix Bohuschke

  Energy-Efficient and Safe Driving Using a Situation-Aware Gamification Approach in Logistics

  Published in Games and Learning Alliance, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 2014

• Michel Rudnianski, Milos Kravcik

  The Road to Critical Thinking and Intelligence Analysis

  Published in Psychology, Pedagogy, and Assessment in Serious Games

2013

• Milos Kravcik, Jian Wan

  Towards Open Corpus Adaptive E-learning Systems on the Web

  Published in Advances in Web-Based Learning (ICWL 2013)

• Davinia Hernández-Leo, Tobias Ley, Ralf Klamma, Andreas Harrer

  Scaling up Learning for Sustained Impact - 8th European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning, EC-TEL 2013, Paphos, Cyprus, September 17-21, 2013. Proceedings. Springer, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 8095, 2013, 978-3-642-40813-7

2012

• Stefano Bocconi, Ralf Klamma, Yulia Bachvarova

  Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Pedagogically-driven Serious Games (PDSG 2012)

  Published in CEUR-WS.org Volume 898

• Antonio Brisson, Gonçalo Pereira, Rui Prada, Sandy Louchart, Neil Suttie, Theo Lim, Ricardo Abreu Lopes, Rafael Bidarra, Francesco Bellotti, Milos Kravcik, Manuel Fradinho Oliveira

  Artificial Intelligence and Personalization Opportunities for Serious Games

  Published in Proceedings of the Joint Workshop on Human Computation and Serious Games at the 8th Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment Conference (AIIDE 2012), Stanford University, October 8-12, 2012, pp. 51-57, AAAI Press.

• Roland Klemke, Milos Kravcik

  Open 3D Environments for Competitive and Collaborative Educational Games

  Published in Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Pedagogically-driven Serious Games (PDSG 2012) In conjunction with the Seventh European Conference on Technology Enhanced Learning (EC-TEL 2012), Saarbrücken (Germany), 18th September, 2012

• Ioana Andreea Stanescu, Antoniu Stefan, Milos Kravcik, Theo Lim, Rafael Bidarra

  Interoperability Strategies for Serious Games Development

  Published in LEVERAGING TECHNOLOGY FOR LEARNING, Proceedings of the 8th International Scientific Conference "eLearning and Software for Education", Bucharest, April 26 - 27, 2012

• Gonçalo Pereira, Antonio Brisson, Rui Prada, Ana Paiva, Francesco Bellotti, Milos Kravcik, Ralf Klamma

  Serious Games for Personal and Social Learning & Ethics: Status and Trends

  Published in The Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Games and Virtual Worlds for Serious Applications (VS-GAMES’12). Edited by Alessandro De Gloria and Sara de Freitas.

• Elvira Popescu, Ling Qi, Ralf Klamma, Howard Leung, Marcus Specht

  Advances in Web-based Learning - ICWL 2012

  Published in Proceedings 11th International Conference, Sinaia, Romania, September 2-4, 2012, LNCS Vol. 7558

2010

• Marc Spaniol, Quing Li, Ralf Klamma, R. W. H. Lau

  Advanced in Web-based Learning - Guest Editorial Preface for Special Issue

  Published in International Journal of Distance Education Technologies (JDET), April-June 2010, Vol. 8, No. 3

• Tobias Vaegs, Darko Dugosija, Stephan Hackenbracht, Anna Hannemann

  Learning by gaming: facts and myths

  Published in International Journal of Technology Enhanced Learning (IJTEL)

2009

• Yiwei Cao, Anna Hannemann, Ralf Klamma, Dominik Renzel

  A Community Success Model for Gaming Communities

  Published in Journal of Multimedia, Vol 4, No 2 (2009), 87-93, Apr 2009, ACADEMY PUBLISHER, doi:10.4304/jmm.4.2.87-93