
Manuel FreireComplutense University of Madrid | UCM · Facultad de Informática
Manuel Freire
PhD in Computer Science and Telecommunications (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)
About
97
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Introduction
Manuel Freire currently works at the Facultad de Informática, Complutense University of Madrid. Manuel does research in E-Learning with Serious Games and Analytics, and has previously worked on, and is still interested in, Information Visualization and Plagiarism Detection.
Manuel is currently working on H2020 EU projects RAGE and Beaconing, and participates in the eMadrid e-learning research network.
Additional affiliations
October 2010 - present
Publications
Publications (97)
How do students use artificial intelligence tools in coursework projects when given the liberty to do so, with the only requirement of documenting how, where and why? We describe experiences with two groups of undergraduates in courses related to serious game authoring and human-computer interaction, both carried out in the second semester of 2023....
Serious games have several advantages for learning over more traditional activities. One of those advantages is that being highly interactive, they provide a first-hand simulated experience to the users. Serious games can also generate interaction data that can be used to assess learning, both for evaluation and to provide timely feedback for learn...
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...
Bioelectric signals can improve assessment in videogames by helping to better understand user experience, evaluate attention, or study the cognitive and physical effects of games. Use of signals is therefore relevant to better evaluate and understand the impact and effects of videogames on players, and specially so in the field of serious games, su...
The serious game industry has been a subject of interest for the educational community in the last few years. However, despite their potential benefits when compared to traditional e-learning, use of serious games in education has been hampered by difficulties, including that of deploying games in multi-platform settings and leveraging data generat...
Interest in the field of serious games (SGs) has grown during the last few years due to its multiple advantages. For example, SGs provide immersive learning environments, where risky or complex scenarios can be tested in safety while keeping players engaged. Moreover, the highly interactive nature of serious games opens new opportunities for applyi...
Serious Game learning analytics can provide insight to improve both the learning process and the lifecycle of games. Due to the complexity and diversity of topics involved, from game design to implementation to tracing the user, teaching game learning analytics to engineering students is challenging. We have created a teaching approach built on an...
Narrative games have proven their effectiveness as serious games in different domains and for different purposes, such as promoting learning or increasing user awareness. However, there are many situations where the narrative model falls short and can benefit from being extended with puzzles or mini-games to afford more flexibility or explore non-n...
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...
Evaluating a serious game is a time-consuming task. However, good evaluations are necessary to improve the effectiveness of serious games, and to prove this effectiveness to stakeholders. Computer support of evaluations requires addressing several problems, including security, privacy protection, data collection from both questionnaires and in-game...
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...
The e-UCM group is working to simplify the processes of both creation and scientific validation of educational adventure games, by making the entire process of game creation, data acquisition, and analysis more transparent and integrated. This paper presents the integration of the uAdventure authoring tool with SIMVA, a tool to simplify validation...
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...
Game engines and developer-friendly authoring tools have greatly simplified entertainment game development. However, this does not extend to serious games which, in particular, require involvement of non-developer stakeholders. We present the first evaluation of uAdventure, an easy-to-use game development environment for narrative point-and-click g...
Developer-friendly professional authoring tools have greatly simplified entertainment videogame development. However, this simplification had a limited impact on serious games, which require the active collaboration of developers with educators and other stakeholders. To address this issue, we present uAdventure, an easy-to-use game development env...
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...
Conectado is a serious game designed to increase the awareness of young people on bullying and cyberbullying in schools. It is designed as an educational tool for teachers, to be used in classrooms with their students to provide a common experience in class about bullying and cyberbullying. Playing the game, students are placed in the role of victi...
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...
Teachers often wish to integrate activities from disparate sources into their courses. For example, gamified activities, mediated through technology, can promote the type of active learning required to develop higher-level engagement by students. However, unless the activities have been designed to facilitate it, integrating their analytics into a...
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...
Computerized neuropsychological tests provide a more systematic and easily administered assessment tool than traditional pen-and-paper tests. We consider that game technology can be effectively applied to decrease the cost of developing computerized versions of traditional tests and can even allow the creation of promising new environments to asses...
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 users....
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...
Although serious games are proven to serve as educational tools in many educational domains, there is a lack of reliable, automated and repeatable methodologies that measure their effectiveness: what do players know after playing serious games? Do they learn from them? Previous research shows that the vast majority of serious games are assessed by...
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...
Pervasive gaming has been a field of exploration for the gaming industry the recent years. With the exceptional success of Pokémon GO and some others such as Ingress users are more than ever ready to experiment with games that are more focused into their actions and their playing contexts. In the serious game industry, the implementation of pervasi...
Educational games can greatly benefit from integrating support for learning analytics. Game authoring tools that make this integration as easy as possible are therefore an important step towards improving adoption of educational games. We describe the process of integrating full support for game learning analytics into uAdventure, a serious game au...
Educational games (aka serious games, SG) are powerful educational contents. However, they are costly to develop, and once developed, SGs become dependent on software and hardware combinations that may become obsolete, such as Adobe Flash or Java Applets. Addressing these problems would allow a much greater use of SGs in education. The eAdventure a...
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...
Este documento describe una metodología de integración de Objetos de Aprendizaje Avanzados
(OAAs) en sistemas de e-Learning, centrándose en Juegos Serios (dónde se incluyen también
simulaciones educativas y simulaciones con estrategia de juego), que se pueden considerar
como un ejemplo de los OAAs más complejos y representativos dentro de este ámbi...
Serious games and simulations are called to fulfill an important role in education. They have already demonstrated effectiveness not only from the point of view of learning, but also as motivation tools. The current work examines the progress that, from the eMadrid Network, is taking place in this research area, together with the new research lines...
In this paper, we describe the special challenges that educational games (also known as serious games) pose for online learning object (LO) repositories. As in all metadata, a tension exists between descriptive power and the effort needed to create these descriptions. This tension is even greater when describing complex, highly interactive multimed...
Video games have become one of the largest entertainment industries, and their power to capture the attention of players worldwide soon prompted the idea of using games to improve education. However, these educational games, commonly referred to as serious games, face different challenges when brought into the classroom, ranging from pragmatic issu...
Although educational games have revealed to be a very effective focus in diverse situations, their use in education is still very limited. In this paper we analyse the main challenges concerning educational games that, from our perspective, have to be approached so that the use of this kind of games can be widespread. These challenges are classifie...
The increasing body of evidence supporting the use of videogames in educational settings (usually referred to as serious games) is pushing their deployment across different areas of the educational system. However, this increased adoption also raises serious ethical issues: videogames are one of the least accessible forms of multimedia, and if educ...
MOOCs are disrupting educational technology by democratizing access to high quality courses offered by some of the most prestigious universities. However, due to low entry cost and multiple other factors, MOOCs suffer from low retention rates: making MOOCs more interactive and engaging is therefore an important goal. Educational games provide envir...
Aunque los juegos educativos se han mostrado como un enfoque muy efectivo en diversas
situaciones su uso en educación continúa siendo limitado. En este artículo analizamos cuales consideramos
que son los principales retos que se deben abordar en los juegos educativos para que se produzca
una generalización de su uso. Estos retos se clasifican en tr...
This paper presents our perspective on serious games, covering relevant aspects of the current situation and what we consider are the key elements to be developed over the next few years. Serious games have undergone a long journey from niche research to application in real settings, coming closer to the generalization of games in mainstream educat...
This paper presents our perspective on serious games, covering relevant aspects of the current situation and what we consider are the key elements to be developed over the next few years. Serious games have undergone a long journey from niche research to application in real settings, coming closer to the generalization of games in mainstream educat...
In this paper, we describe the special challenges that educational games (aka serious games) pose for online Learning Object repositories. As in all metadata, a tension exists between descriptive power and the effort needed to create these descriptions. This tension is even greater when describing complex highly interactive multimedia content such...
Massive Online Open Courses are in the process of radically changing the use of technology in education, as measured both by the number of enrolled students and the level of academic excellence of the institutions that are driving their adoption. Typically, online learning management systems have relied on simple questionnaires for feedback and eva...
We present EGDA, an educational game development approach focused on the teaching of procedural knowledge using a cost-effective approach. EGDA proposes four tasks: analysis, design, implementation, and quality assurance that are subdivided in a total of 12 subtasks. One of the benefits of EGDA is that anyone can apply it to develop a game since it...
The Learning Analytics (LA) discipline analyzes educational data obtained from student interaction with online resources. Most of the data is collected from Learning Management Systems deployed at established educational institutions. In addition, other learning platforms, most notably Massive Open Online Courses such as Udacity and Coursera or oth...