Comenius

This paper describes an empirical work dedicated to the design and analysis of the uses of Tamagocours, a collaborative multiplayer online game. Tamagocours has been designed to address an educational challenge: teaching the rules (ie. copyright) that comply with the policies for the use of digital resources in an educational context. The challenge lies in the fact that the subject is complex, the time dedicated to this course is short, students are not motivated enough by the topic, and few educators are available. The design of the game and the analysis of its use are based on a theoretical model (Russian Matryoschka Model of Play) adapted from the Theory of Didactical Situations (Brousseau, 1998). Rather than the game itself, we consider the play, the situation established within the game. This situation enables epistemic interactions (ie. interactions involved in the learning process and called digital epistemic play). We distinguish two layers of play. The first layer is dedicated to action (ie. interactions between students and the game). The second layer of play is devoted to formulation of the applied strategies and to discussions which enables the validation of the latter strategies. Another layer of interaction consists in leaving the situation of play and in a debriefing conducted by an educator.
Tamagocours is based on a metaphor; a tamagotchi which needs to be fed with digital educational resources. The gameplay consists in (1) choosing a resource, (2) chatting with partners in order to discuss its relevance and (3) feeding the Tamagocours with this resource. The feedback provided by the Tamagocours character depends on the characteristics of the resource. One which complies with the policies enables the player to earn points; otherwise, the Tamagocours could be killed if fed too many inappropriate resources.
Our methodology is based on recording and analyzing the digital traces produced by a group of 25 students (8 teams) who played during a 90 minutes session. The students’ discussions where coded and the digital traces enabled us to draw a behavioural model of the students.
Our study is based on the analysis of digital traces produced by a group of 25 students (8 teams) during a 90 minutes game session. The coded discussions and the analysed digital traces enabled us to draw a behavioural model of the students.
This paper aims at discussing the relevance of our method in drawing a behavioural model of the students by identifying Action patterns and describing the strategies of the players/learners.

Sanchez, E, & Emin, V. (2014). Toward a model of play: an empirical study. In C. Busch (Ed.), Proceedings of the 8th European Conference on Games Based Learning (Vol. Vol 2, pp. 503-512). Berlin, Germany.