Validation of a Cyberbullying Serious Game Using Game Analytics

Abstract

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 cyberbullying, such as school buddies, educational videos, or involving police in counseling; however, awareness continues to be insufficient. We have developed Conectado, a serious game to be used in the classroom to increase awareness on bullying and cyberbullying in schools. While playing the game, students gain a first-hand immersive experience of the problem and the associated emotions, fostering awareness and empathy with victims. This paper describes Conectado and presents its validation with actual students using game analytics.

Be a Buddy not a Bully - Two Educational Games to Help Prevent Bullying in Schools

“…There also exist several educational games which have dealt with bullying prevention. For example, Calvo-Morataetal et al [3,4] used the serious game Conectado [20] as educational tool for teachers. The game can be used in classrooms to increase the awareness among young people about bullying and cyberbullying in schools.…”

“…With the widespread availability and the wide distribution of digital communication, online bullying has become a serious problem (cf. [2,4,7,14,21]). In order to prevent bullying situations, workshops and specially designed lessons are commonly organized at schools to make children more sensitive to this topic.…”

Simva: Simplifying the Scientific Validation of Serious Games

“…Simva has helped us in different validation experiments to simplify data collection and processing, saving us time and automating some of the processes that were most prone to errors. We have used Simva with more than 1000 students and 3 different serious games: in Conectado [2] we linked questionnaires with the collected LA data; in First Aid Game [8] we linked together data from two experiments over time; and in the 15 Objects test [9] we used the metadata feature to include the information of which of the two versions of the game each student was using.…”

“…These types of games are commonly referred to as serious games, and have had an increasing impact in different domains such as medicine, psychology or business, becoming more frequent every day. Moreover, research on serious games have found them to be an effective tool to teach very diverse subjects, from mathematics [1] to social problems [2], and even to enable scientific discoveries [3].…”

Game Learning Analytics for Educators

“…If that is the case, as between both measures the only intervention is the game, it can be concluded that the increase in that characteristic is due to the game effect, and therefore the game is formally validated. There are plenty of examples in literature that use this approach to validate serious games including, for instance: a game for children with autism to learn emotions [10], a game for patients to manage pain after surgery [11] or a game to raise awareness about bullying and cyberbullying [12].…”