Session T1E 978-1-4244-6262-9/10/$26.00 ©2010 IEEE October 27 - 30, 2010, Washington, DC 40 th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference T1E-1 Work in Progress - Using Interactivity Video Games Factors to Define Role Playing Games as a Supporting Tool for Learning By Doing Gilberto Huesca, Julieta Noguez, Luis Neri and Víctor Robledo-Rella Tecnológico de Monterrey, Campus Ciudad de México, ghjuarez@itesm.mx, jnoguez@itesm.mx, neri@itesm.mx, vrobledo@itesm.mx Abstract - Edutainment has emerged as a computational area that combines entertainment and education in order to engage students to learn in creative ways. Role Playing Games (RPG) are a type of games where players take the role of a character within a story and make decisions to advance and reach a given goal. RPG’s are highly interactive entertainment tools that propose complex virtual worlds and rich and interesting story lines. These characteristics could be used to engage students and as vehicles to deliver educational material. Based on this, we have developed a generic architecture for edutainment systems called RchEd. This architecture defines a User Interface component to support multimedia deployment. An Edutainment System component will manage user interactions and the game development. The methodology, edutainment architecture and preliminary results are shown. Index Terms - Edutainment, Serious Games, Role Playing Games, Physics education, Engineering education. INTRODUCTION Serious games are a computational application that combines serious aspects (teaching, learning, communication or information) with the playful characteristics of video games [1]. Edutainment is a specific serious game application that merges teaching methods and games characteristics to engage students in order to make easier their learning process [2]. Its main objective is to present education in a more motivating way than in traditional approaches so that students can enjoy more this process and increase their interest on the content that is taught. This could augment the quality and efficiency of the teaching-learning process. We have conducted a study at the Tecnológico de Monterrey, Campus Ciudad de México to define video games critical factors used in edutainment environments. Based on this study, we have developed a generic architecture for edutainment systems that tries to maximize the educational concepts presence and maintain a high entertainment factor. Also, a Role Playing Game for teaching Physics has being designed as a case study for this architecture. RELATED WORK Siquiera et al. [3] present a generic architecture for educational and training systems. Its components give support to the creation of educational web systems that manage and present its contents in different media formats. This architecture defines components that help in the adaptation process of these contents to the current cognitive state of the student and the learning objectives identified by the professor. Sobral et al. [4] say that a narrative component is very important in an edutainment system. It can capture and maintain the student attention using diverse sequence of events. An architecture for edutainment systems based on narrative is presented. This architecture includes a component to represent students as characters involved in an RPG game. These components will interact with the virtual world model that will manage the domain model for the game and the multimedia deployment. Characteristics and needs of the characters will affect the virtual world deployment. These needs can be defined as entertainment goals or educational goals. To create a balance between what to teach and how to teach it is a challenging task. The type of game employed should be defined carefully in order to increase the effectiveness of the learning concepts. This must be supported by entertainment factors that fulfill the student expectations from the game and support teaching needs. VIDEO GAME CHARACTERISTICS DEFINITION In order to define which characteristics can help to minimize the effects of the narrative paradox [4], we have conducted a survey process divided into two parts. The survey was applied to professors and students to know their opinion about the use of video games as teaching/learning tools. The first process was applied to 28 professors and was composed of a 20 questions survey. Most of them teach in an engineering undergraduate level. This study shows that 96% of professors think that a video game can help their teaching process and 93% of them consider using a video game in their courses. Also, 35% of professors feel that a video game could be used as a problem solving tool. Case study activities, to show a solution where there is not a unique answer and to create complex projects have 18% of