Housing +. An Erasmus+ educational innovation project for critical learning of content on law and housing.

In mid-2023 we had the pleasure of publishing a video game, actually a Serious Game about real estate civil law. At GECON.es we are not very fond of using Serious Games for various reasons, but in this case, we understood that the combination of gamified educational processes and the production of a serious game could be beneficial objectives of this project.

Context

Housing+ is a pedagogical innovation project funded by the Erasmus+ call (Cooperation for innovation and the exchange of good practices / Strategic partnership for higher education) and which, among its many objectives, is to bring students and professionals in the field of Housing (students real estate civil law, economists, politicians, consultants, property registrars, etc.) the knowledge about the systems that interact with each other within this immense sector that is the Housing Sector in Spain and Europe.

The complexity of teaching Civil Law at Universities increases because the new generations of students are more accustomed to content in media format and, of course, the Real Estate Law Manual is anything but multimedia. It is rather a very hard compilation of laws without, not even, examples of application or jurisprudence. We are talking about a generation that is now in its 20s and that, according to the OECD (2018), grew up with internet in their homes and mobile phones (95%) and that participate in social networks daily (73%) or that are in some way or another online every day (61%), that is, most of the information that these students have received throughout their lives has been in digital format and, in many cases, through videos, online social interactions of diverse nature and games (single or multiplayer):

Today’s students are essentially different from previous generations in the way they think, access, absorb, interpret, process, and apply information and, above all, in the way they view, interact, and communicate in this technology-rich and connected world  (Klibavičius, 2014)

This situation is especially hard for teachers in the classroom, who look for attractive alternatives to the use of classical teaching methods with the aim of attracting attention, motivating and actively engaging the student with the contents of their subjects.

The Project:

As you can read on the project page itself:

Housing+ aims to improve academic training in the real estate and housing field among professionals, stakeholders, legislators and academics through training materials with interdisciplinary, international and new technology content, such as videos and gamification.

Housing+ aims to bring the contents related to the real estate and housing sector closer through a review of the texts on law and jurisprudence, putting in a pleasant textual language all the existing theoretical-practical knowledge on the subject and, later, translating all that knowledge to turn it into interactive media, whether they are animated presentations or gamified applications/serious games.

The GECON.es Foundation has been assigned two important parts in this project called IOs (from Intellectual Outputs), out of a total of six IOS, which are:

• IO2. Guidelines for the implementation of gamification in Housing Education (HE) practices.
• IO3. Gamified Mobile micro-learning platform.

In other words, we had to carry out a hybrid project in which gamification itself would help us identify the best gamified practices to be included in the housing teaching processes, while helping us design a gamified micro-learning platform. which we would also produce later. Said like this, it may sound a bit convoluted but, since at GECON.es we use the GMC gamification framework, the truth is that it allows us to carry out not only decision-making and design tasks, but also data capture and analysis.

They are part of the consortium of this project:

• Universitat Rovira i Virgili (Coordination, leadership and contents in Housing)
• University of Galway (Housing content)
• University of Silesia in Katowice (Housing content)
• Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (Blockchain)
• GECON.es Foundation (Gamification)

The Process (Methodology)

We can summarize the process of creating the gamified application in several steps:

1. Use of the GMC v2.0 framework for the capture of user profile data through three workshops in the different participating universities and analysis and conclusions of the data obtained for the definition of the different profiles
2. Conceptual and functional design of the gamified application
3. Discussion and redesign process
4. Production of the gamified application
5. Testing of the gamified application and design of missions/lessons by students and teachers. 

We reiterate that the objective of GECON.es within the project is the design of an application that, using game elements, generates more impact and engagement in students of subjects related to Housing, regardless of their profile.

1. Use of the GMC v2.0 framework and analysis of results

Three data capture workshops were carried out with students and teachers from the three different universities that participate in the consortium, for which the Gamification Model Canvas v2.0 was used. The objective of these workshops is to generate a player profiling that helps us better understand the users of the experience and, in this way, make the best design decisions for the gamified application, that is, generate the greatest possible engagement.

The results of these workshops showed that the most frequent typology of users was Achievers and Consumers, followed by Explorer. These profiles were highly identified with entertainment based on Creativity, Competition, Science Fiction, Drama, Comedy and Romance.

Their main obstacles to studying the Housing subject is the lack of time, the inability to combine daily activities with studying, also due to the lack of routine.

The detected profiles also showed a predisposition to aesthetics related to Discovery, the surprise factor and Learning new knowledge along with the Challenge to Improve themselves, feel Productive and Visualize their Progress.

This is a very general summary of all the data collected and analyzed after the execution of the three workshops that serves as a sample of the work carried out. All the detailed information and its subsequent detailed analysis were vital for the next step, that is: Conceptual and functional design of the gamified application.

2. Conceptual and functional design of the gamified application

Thanks to the data analyzed in the previous step, we were able to elucidate what type of users the application that we would develop from GECON.es would have, approximately. Now it was necessary to find the right mechanics, one that would allow these users to feel identified with the app and, therefore, generate that engagement that would encourage its use and, therefore, the learning of the Housing subjects.

Para ello, la aplicación debería contar con unas características específicas:

• It had to be cross-platform: Web / Mobile
• Gameplay should work through simple interaction
• The gamified experience should be focused on Discovery as well as Exploration and Achievement
• The entire experience had to be carried out through ubiquitous micro-actions
• There should be user-generated content (students and teachers)
• It would be an online single player experience
• Try to generate a non-linear storytelling
• Aesthetically it should have a high visual appeal
• It would have to have simplicity in the management of interfaces
• Have a statistical layer

Various mechanics were investigated from both board games, mobile applications and various video games in which “content delivery” was produced through agile non-linear and interactive narratives, as well as those that had very simple interaction systems, so that any user, regardless of whether or not they had previous experience playing video games, were able to use our application. Special emphasis was placed on mobile video games because they have very easy-to-use interfaces. These apps and games include Duolingo, Paper Please, Coup: City State, and Reigns.

Finally it was decided to use the base of the mechanics of the video game Reigns (which in turn is based on the mechanics of Tinder) but in a much more simplified way. Of course, the conceptual designs had to be agreed upon with the rest of the consortium in the next step: Discussion and redesign process.

3. Discussion and redesign process

Of course, the consortium agreed with the mechanics designed where the lessons would be converted into conflict situations to which the user has to respond through a very simple interaction with two response possibilities, translated into the interaction language, to move a card to the right (answer A) or to the left (answer B). However, this solution did not respond to all the needs of the project, especially taking into account that from GECON.es we are not experts in the topic and that, therefore, it was expected a long and tedious process of discussion and decision-making with the teachers, threatening to exhaust all the resources allocated to this project in a spiral of meetings and corrections and, therefore, gamifying far fewer lessons than planned. In addition, such a process usually leaves all the participants in the decision-making exhausted and can lead to the shipwreck of the project as a whole.

By listing the two main drawbacks of the project, we could say that:

1. The development teams (GECON.es & Ludens) are not experts in the field that should become a gamified mission according to the GEAR and GDD guidelines (gamification analysis and design documents).
2. Expert teams in Housing could have a negative impact on game design by trying to generate an experience that is too literal due to an attempt to respect the narrative integrity of the content, something that internally at GECON.es we call “narrativization of gameplay”.

Finally, from GECON.es we proposed to the consortium the possibility of creating an intuitive and easily accessible tool for converting lessons (narratives) into missions (playable). This tool, together with several user manuals and recommendations, would allow both students and teachers to create their own “missions” based on the lessons they were in charge of.

4. Production of the gamified application

The production of the gamified application was carried out in Unity3D, which allowed us a lot of versatility in the execution of both mobile and desktop environments using the web browser as the execution platform and a “responsive” design adaptable to almost any device. The database in which the information of the user profiles, their games and scores, etc. is registered uses Firebase backup technology.

The development of the application was carried out by the Ludens team, coordinated by GECON.es. The solution proposed by both teams to the edition of missions by the students and teachers of the Housing+ project, was to provide a platform for the creation of said missions. Since creating a parallel platform just for the creation of missions could have become too expensive in terms of time and resources, we decided on an alternative proposed by Ludens: Allow users to create their missions through excel templates and use that data to generate new missions.

For this, not only the game itself was produced, but also a quick testing application executable locally (desktop), user manuals for said testing application and also user manuals for the proposed excel template.

5. Testing of the application and Design of gamified lessons.

After the design and production of the main application as well as the mission creation testing application (Testing Tool App), several training days were held with the teams from the universities involved, which selected students and professors as working groups.

These working groups analyzed in depth the chapters generated in the IO4 (Course book on “Housing Studies”) and, during internal design and discussion sessions (co-creation days), came to create up to 20 missions, far exceeding the best perspectives of creating missions from direct collaborations between the teaching team and the design and development team.

The manuals for both the management of the Excel templates for the creation of missions and the use and management of the Testing Tool App were improved thanks to the iterations with both the students and the teachers participating in the actions.

The Results

The main and most important result is a “container” app playable and executable both on mobile and on PC in which the students of the topic, covered by the project, can play lessons transformed into missions in a very easy and intuitive way thanks to a Reigns-type mechanics in which the decisions made must maintain a balance between all the powers involved: Citizenship, State, Banking and the Real Estate Sector.

The second result is a mission creation system that allows both students and teachers to create their own missions based on IO4 themes or any other source of knowledge on the subject in question. Any user with basic knowledge of Excel is capable of creating their own mission-lesson. In addition, before uploading a final version to the main application, the user has a testing application (Testing Tool App) on both Windows and MAC to test whether the mission created is functionally correct and correctly balanced to be uploaded to the final app.

As indicated in the documentation created to explain the use of said testing application, the Testing Tool App allows the user:

• Load missions created in a local context
• Interact with missions created with the same level of interactivity as the definitive online platform
• Review the behavior of each of the cards created
• Review the response of the different “Powers” involved to balance the responses and correct the mission if necessary
• Test the difficulty of the mission and correct it if necessary.

As a third result of the project, we can include the missions-lessons themselves, which, thanks to the mission creation system, have undoubtedly been much more numerous than if they had been created through the traditional method, that is, a tedious collaboration between teaching staff and developers. In total about 20 missions-lessons have been created. The most optimistic estimate of creating quest-lessons via the traditional method would have been, at best, about 10 quest-lessons.

Observed benefits

Regarding the impact that the use of this new pedagogical tool and methodology has had on the student community and teachers, we can divide them mainly into two: The dynamics generated by the gamified application as a “player” user and the dynamics generated by the creation platform. of missions-lessons, that is, as a “designer” user.

Benefits of the playable app (as player):

1. Microlearning. Entertaining and fun learning through successive very short interactions that occur repetitively to maximize user exposure to content and facilitate learning while avoiding exhaustion
2. Increase periods of concentration. As it is very complicated and dense content exposed in text material, the periods of concentration in a generation more prone to multimedia content are reduced. By turning said content into short-term interactive material, we actually increase the time in which students spend in contact with the material concentrating on solving the problems exposed.
3. Dynamic learning (Learning by Doing). Learning using our gamified application is not linear-narrative but systemic-interactive. Certainly there is content that is presented for reading, but the important thing is that the user must make decisions with consequences, this means that when the user has the necessary knowledge, their decisions are better within the game and vice versa, as they try different situations they learn which is the best one about.
4. Ubiquitous learning. As it is a fully operational tool both on PC and on mobile devices (responsive design), learning can be carried out anywhere and in any situation where these devices can be used.
5. Systemic thinking. The economic, social, political and legal system is made up of the interaction of various agents under a series of rules that are sometimes clear and sometimes not. Imparting knowledge about these systems in a narrative and linear way is leaving aside the reactions and manifestations that these systems can encompass, thus leaving aside vital information for understanding them. By choosing a gamified system as a learning tool, students are involved in these interactions and, therefore, are helped to understand how these systems work in a live way and not just by providing them with some rules or specific stories as a guide of working examples.

Benefits of the mission-lesson creation system (as designer):

1. Critical Thinking in students. Having to create interactive missions from narrative content, students have had to exude doses of creativity and critical thinking, so that the narrative content has been transformed into situations full of dilemmas and, sometimes even conflicts, that players must solve. In addition, critical thinking was necessary to elucidate how the decisions of the players could affect the different economic, social, political and real estate systems/powers.
2. Better Student-Teacher communication. The work of translating the lessons of the project into missions of the gamified application has been supervised by the teachers, this has meant the establishment of a constant and fluid discussion process between teachers and students, communications and discussions that did not happen when the contents are taught in the traditional way.
3. Student empowerment and identification with the topic. Students having to defend certain decisions in the design of the missions/lessons in front of the teachers has implied that the students have had to empower themselves through in-depth knowledge of the lessons, thus generating a personal identification with said lessons, internalizing the information to generate firm arguments that can be defended against teachers with self-confidence.
4. Quantity and quality of missions. If we had followed a traditional teacher-developer collaboration model, surely the number of missions created would have been much lower given the budgetary limitations. By devising a user-generated-content system where students, supervised by teachers, have created their own quests based on the lessons in the project book, we have made the number of quests much higher and can actually be infinite because the only limitation is the amount of collaboration by students and teachers committed to the action. All the lessons were carried out in co-creation days held in the different participating universities. 
5. Fewer interactions between developers and pedagogical managers. By reducing the interactions between teachers and developers, the opportunities to generate friction between two worlds with very few points in common have also been limited, and it has allowed the final result to remain in the hands of students and teachers, giving the latter creative freedom to include the most appropriate content that they considered for each mission-lesson.

The benefits observed by the pedagogical and development team of the gamified application have also been shared by the participating students, as can be seen in a survey answered by them at the end of the experience. Among the questions that were asked, we highlight the answers to two of them about the improvement in the learning of the subject through this new tool:

J2. How much do you learn about the subject using this game?

63.6% indicated that they learn a very much, 18.2% indicate that they learn a lot and another 18.2% that they learn enough.

J4. Do you think this game improves understanding of the subject taught?

54.5% indicate that the game greatly improves the understanding of the topic taught compared to 45.5% indicating that it improves a lot.

Conclusions

In the Housing+ project, different tasks have been carried out with the aim of improving both the quality of the contents and the access to them through an update of said contents using innovative didactic methodologies such as gamification and the use of gaming and mobile  technologies (IO2 and IO3).

Complying with the tasks assigned in the report, the GECON.es Foundation designed and held various workshops to capture user information, so that profiles for gamification were obtained. Subsequently, this information was processed using the GMC Framework, thanks to which the GEAR (Gamification Engagement Architecture Report) documents were built, and later the GDD (Gamification Design Document). The first that reflects the conclusions of the different workshops held with each of the universities that participate in Housing+ as part of the consortium and the second document as an integral part of the design of the final product, that is, the gamified application (IO3). Thanks to this gamified application and after testing it with the students of the universities involved, we detected the following benefits: Microlearning, increased concentration period, dynamic learning, ubiquitous learning and systemic thinking.

However, the gamified application posed certain major challenges, especially with regard to the suitability of the contents once they are transformed from something merely readable, narrative and linear (as we find in textbooks) into something playful, interactive and systemic. Neither Housing teachers usually understand how games work in terms of imparting knowledge, nor do developers of a gamified game/experience know the ins and outs of housing topics and with its hundreds of associated parameters. This circumstance could lead to conflicts occurring during the design and execution of the IO3 that endangered the project itself.

To solve this situation before it occurred, a participatory solution “user generated content” and “learning by doing” was used, which places students not only as a mere recipient of information (although it is more attractive because it is gamified), but it also makes them co-creators of the missions-lessons for this application.

This decision has led to greater interaction between teachers and students and between students and the materials of the topic to be energized thanks to the Housing+ project. Among some of the benefits stimulated are: Promotion of critical thinking, improvement of students-teachers communication, empowerment of the students, identification with the topic, increase in the quantity and quality of the missions-lessons and minimization of the pedagogue-game designer conflict.

Finally, the statistics of a survey shared with the participating students and teachers show positive data on the use of gamification in education and specifically on the gamified application Housing+ as a facilitating, entertaining and fun tool for learning the contents of the subject.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Klibavičius, D. (2014). New media in the education of the Net Generation. Creativity Studies, 7(2), 82–97.

Burns  Ed., T., & Gottschalk  Ed., F. (2020). Education in the Digital Age: Healthy and Happy Children. Educational Research and Innovation. OECD Publishing.