Categories
Pages
-

DBIS

Reach for the Stars: Gamified Group Work in Mixed Reality

December 16th, 2021

Collaboration and group work are essential parts of learning since they encourage students to exchange ideas, to learn from each other and to support each other. The ability to work as a team increases the quality and amount of results and is therefore a highly demanded soft skill. However, students who face group work in courses still encounter challenges regarding efficient coordination, motivation and communication when working on group assignments or in learning groups. This becomes evident in processes where one person does all the work. Other common examples include a lack of communication where the group accumulates their individual results only at the end of the project and the participants cannot compensate if some members failed to deliver their results on time. Mixed Reality bears the potential to provide a structured 3D environment for organization and collaboration where group tasks can be split up visually between participants in virtual meetings. Additionally, Gamification can provide means of motivation to continue with a learning task and to strengthen the unity of the team.

Thesis Type
  • Bachelor
Student
Jakob Miesner
Status
Finished
Submitted in
2021
Proposal on
27/04/2021 12:35 am
Proposal room
Presentation on
05/10/2021 1:00 pm
Supervisor(s)
Ralf Klamma
Stefan Decker
Advisor(s)
Benedikt Hensen
Contact
hensen@dbis.rwth-aachen.de

The goal of this Bachelor thesis is to explore how the combination of Mixed Reality technology and Gamification can support group work in learning processes. The work should utilize existing findings in the field of CSCW, especially the Coordination Theory by Malone and Crowston. In addition, from learning theory, the Social Interdependence Theory can also be utilized to realize the Mixed Reality application which guides students to perform efficient group work. The application can be gamified by incentivizing the tasks and learning content with a story that demonstrates great achievements reached by collaboration. For instance, the application can contain a virtual game about a space mission. It acts as a metaphor, where the milestones of the space project can only be reached by solving parts of the group assignment. The application should be implemented for smartphone-based AR so that it becomes available to many students.


Prerequisites:

Must: Good knowledge of C#, Java
Beneficial: Experience in CSCW, Unity


Related Projects:
VIAProMa