RouteMe: a multilevel pervasive game on mobile ad hoc routing

Abstract

Pervasive educational games have the potential to transfer learning content to real-life experiences beyond lecture rooms, through realizing field trips in an augmented or virtual manner. This article introduces the pervasive educational game ''RouteMe'' that brings the rather abstract topic of routing in ad hoc networks to real-world environments. The game is designed for university-level courses and supports these courses in a motivating manner to deepen the learning experience. Students slip into the role of either routing nodes or applications with routing demands. On three consecutive levels of difficulty, they get introduced with the game concept, learn the basic routing mechanisms and become aware of the general limitations and functionality of routing nodes. This paper presents the pedagogical and technical game concept as well as findings from an evaluation in a university setting.

Using pervasive games as learning tools in educational contexts: a systematic review

“…• Application of this knowledge (i.e., the theory learned in class) in the real world (Lemcke et al, 2015;Ahmad and Rahman, 2015).…”

“…• Interaction between classmates to achieve a common objective, combining and sharing knowledge (Lemcke et al, 2015;Nordby et al, 2016).…”

“…• Student support to show them around and help them settle into the academic environment (Köhlmann et al, 2012;Zender et al, 2014;Lemcke et al, 2015).…”

“…• Context-based learning (Frias-Martinez et al, 2012;Köhlmann et al, 2012;Zender et al, 2014;Lemcke et al, 2015;Lamrani and Abdelwahed, 2016).…”

“…Various applications have also been developed to answer the call from educational institutions for technological tools that can be implemented in the teaching process, but not all have the same aims. For example, mixed systems are controlled by a central server, and client terminals (represented by mobile devices) capture environment data while showing information to the player (Ferreira et al, 2015;Lemcke et al, 2015). More specifically, we discovered an interesting app in the field of evaluation that enables the teacher to assess students and track their improved performance.…”