Cristina Alonso-Fernandez

Complutense University of Madrid | UCM · Department of Software Engineering and Artificial Intelligence

Serious games (SGs) provide an opportunity to address social issues in an interactive environment that is particularly appealing and engaging for school-aged children. Gender stereotypes are one of the most prevalent gender-related issues in current society. Stereotypes appear at early ages and are a global problem, even if they are particularly pr...

Serious Games provide an opportunity to address social issues in an interactive environment particularly appealing for school-aged children. Gender stereotypes are one of the many remaining gender-related issues in current society. Stereotypes appear at early ages and are particularly prevalent in certain cultures and countries. This paper presents...

Violence and discrimination against women are serious problems that affect today's society regardless of culture or social environment. Educational and government programs addressing these gender issues are difficult to scale up, insufficient or, in some cases, nonexistent. Digital resources can contribute to address discrimination against women an...

Game learning analytics (GLA) comprise the collection, analysis, and visualization of player interactions with serious games. The information gathered from these analytics can help us improve serious games and better understand player actions and strategies, as well as improve player assessment. However, the application of analytics is a complex an...

Computer and video games have established themselves in society and are increasingly finding their way into learning with so-called Educational Games (EduGame). EduGames often provides a fundamental analysis of learners' learning results, but there is currently no existing approach to map the learning results automatically to digital standardized m...

Computer and video games have established themselves in society and are increasingly finding their way into learning with so-called Educational Games (EduGame). EduGames often provides a fundamental analysis of learners' learning results, but there is currently no existing approach to map the learning results automatically to digital standardized m...

In-game learning supports aim to help students solve game levels (i.e., game-related supports), and connect to underlying content (i.e., content-related and hybrid supports). Students with different levels of prior knowledge may have different needs for in-game supports. In this study, we designed a 2D physics game with game-related, content-relate...

Data science applications in education are quickly proliferating, partially due to the use of LMSs and MOOCs. However, the application of data science techniques in the validation and deployment of serious games is still scarce. Among other reasons, obtaining and communicating useful information from the varied interaction data captured from seriou...

Serious games are highly interactive systems which can therefore capture large amounts of player interaction data. This data can be analyzed to provide a deep insight into the effect of the game on its players. However, traditional techniques to assess players of serious games make little use of interaction data, relying instead on costly external...

Serious games have proven to be educational tools with numerous positive effects, capable of promoting learning, changing behavior, or improving training and skills development, among other effects. Serious games can also be applied to address and prevent social problems. This study describes the experiments and analyses we have carried out to test...

We examined the use and effectiveness of an incentive system—one of the five elements of a theory-based motivational architecture in educational games that we proposed—in a computer-based physics game on students’ learning and performance. The incentive system’s purpose was to motivate students to access learning supports designed to facilitate con...

Education on gender equality is an essential foundation to improve our society. Many of the current inequality or sexist situations have their roots at a very young age, when the mindset is constructed and stereotypes are created and fixed. At such young ages, education is essential. Also, in these ages, videogames are an interactive tool with a ma...

Presentación sobre "Juegos serios para educar en igualdad de género", basada en el artículo: Alma Barrera, Cristina Alonso-Fernández, Baltasar Fernández-Manjón (2020): Review of serious games to educate on gender equality. Technological Ecosystems for Enhancing Multiculturality (TEEM), 21-23 October 2020, Salamanca (Spain).

Game Learning Analytics can be used to conduct evidence-based evaluations of the effect that serious games produce on their players by combining in-game user interactions and traditional evaluation methods. We illustrate this approach with a case-study where we conduct an evidence-based evaluation of a serious game’s effectiveness to increase aware...

Serious games' evaluation and players' assessment is commonly done with experiments where the users play the game and fulfill one or more questionnaires. The tool Simva was designed to simplify these complex experiments, which commonly include the collection of game learning analytics data to provide further insight about players' progress and resu...

Serious games are an effective and highly motivational educational tool that has proved to be capable of changing users’ attitudes and raising awareness in a great variety of fields, including mental health. A couple of decades ago, new technologies in general, and serious games, in particular, started to be incorporated into prevention programs, s...

The suitability of games for learning has been proven for many years. However, effective application of games in education requires two important stages: their initial validation, and their later use in the classroom. Serious games should be validated prior to exploitation to prove their efficacy and usefulness as tools for teachers, via larger exp...

Serious games have proven to be a powerful tool in education to engage, motivate, and help students learn. However, the change in student knowledge after playing games is usually measured with traditional (paper) prequestionnaires–postquestionnaires. We propose a combination of game learning analytics and data mining techniques to predict knowledge...

Using games for education can increase the motivation and engagement of students and provide a more authentic learning environment where students can learn, test and apply new knowledge. However, the actual (serious) game application in schools is still limited, partly because teachers consider their use as a complex process. To increase game adopt...

Serious games are still complex to deploy in classrooms for average teachers. Game Learning Analytics can help teachers to apply serious games, using data from students’ in-game interactions to provide learning information. Many teachers do not see games as tools to improve their classes, particularly due to perceived loss of control when using gam...

Serious games are still complex to deploy in classrooms for average teachers. Game Learning Analytics can help teachers to apply serious games, using data from students' in-game interactions to provide learning information. Many teachers do not see games as tools to improve their classes, particularly due to perceived loss of control when using gam...

Learning games are becoming popular among teachers as educational tools. However, despite all the game development quality processes (e.g., beta testing), there is no total assurance about the game design appropriateness to the students’ cognitive skills until the games are used in the classroom. Furthermore, games designed specifically for Intelle...

Data science techniques, nowadays widespread across all fields, can also be applied to the wealth of information derived from student interactions with serious games. Use of data science techniques can greatly improve the evaluation of games, and allow both teachers and institutions to make evidence-based decisions. This can increase both teacher a...

Serious Games have already proved their advantages in different educational environments. Combining them with Game Learning Analytics can further improve the life-cycle of serious games, by informing decisions that shorten development time and reduce development iterations while improving their impact, therefore fostering their adoption. Game Learn...

Serious games validation is a highly complex and burdensome process. To ensure that games meet their intended educational goals, it is necessary to have a clear experimental design and the necessary tools to minimize the errors that may appear in the process. In this article, after describing the most common problems that we have found while valida...

Experience API (xAPI) is a specification to collect data about the actions of a person in a learning environment. This standard was created by a community lead by ADL. The xAPI-SG Profile provides a common vocabulary to capture data from Serious Games. This presentation provides details about xAPI, its application to Serious Games with the xAPI...

Bullying is a serious social problem at schools, very prevalent independently of culture and country, and particularly acute for teenagers. With the irruption of always-on communications technology, the problem, now termed cyberbullying, is no longer restricted to school premises and hours. There are many different approaches to address cyberbullyi...

Purpose We summarize our experiences regarding three applications of Learning Analytics (LA) for Serious Games (SGs) with different purposes: A. Validate and deploy games in schools. The SG Conectado has been designed to address social problems (bullying and cyberbullying). B. Validate game design when information cannot be directly gathered from...

Game learning analytics has a great potential to provide insight and improve the use of games in different educational situations. However, it is necessary to clearly establish what the learner's requirements are and to set realistic expectations about the learning process and outcomes. Application of game learning analytics requires pedagogically...

The engaging and goal-oriented nature of serious games has been proven to increase student motivation. Games also allow learning assessment in a non-intrusive fashion. To increase adoption of serious games, their full lifecycle, including design, development, validation, deployment and iterative refinement must be made as simple and transparent as...

Applying games in education provides multiple benefits clearly visible in entertainment games: their engaging, goal-oriented nature encourages students to improve while they play. Educational games, also known as Serious Games (SGs) are video games designed with a main purpose other than pure entertainment; their main purpose may be to teach, to ch...