Apresentação realizada no SBGames 2013

1. XII Simpósio Brasileiro de Jogos e Entretenimento Digital - SBGames 2013
Pingo - An Online Portal for
Educational Games
with Customizable Content
Denise N. Nogueira
Luiz Chaimowicz
Raquel O. Prates

2. Introduction
 Games evoke
behaviors in their
players that are
favorable to learning,
such as:




persistence,
risk-taking,
attention to detail,
problem solving skills.

3. Goal
 To create a system that:
 Is a repository of games of various
disciplines;
 Enables teachers of Brazilian schools to
customize their content and use them with
students, assisting in strengthening the
content taught in classroom.

4. Motivation
Rice (2007)*
identified
barriers to
implementation
of educational
games in
schools:
• Negative perceptions among teachers and
educators;
• Low graphics quality;
• Lack of adequate hardware in school;
• Lack of instructional time in for activities
involving games;
• Lack of affordance within artificial environments
to properly represent desired learning objectives;
• Lack of alignment for objectives within
commercial gaming environments to state and
local standards.
*Rice, J. W. (2007). New Media Resistance : Barriers to Implementation of Computer
Video Games in the Classroom. Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia,
16:249--261.

5. Motivation
Rice (2007)*
identified
barriers to
implementation
of educational
games in
schools:
• Negative perceptions among teachers and
educators;
• Low graphics quality;
• Lack of adequate hardware in school;
• Lack of instructional time in for activities
involving games;
• Lack of affordance within artificial environments
to properly represent desired learning objectives;
• Lack of alignment for objectives within
commercial gaming environments to state and
local standards.
*Rice, J. W. (2007). New Media Resistance : Barriers to Implementation of Computer
Video Games in the Classroom. Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia,
16:249--261.

6. Motivation
Rice (2007)*
identified
barriers to
implementation
of educational
games in
schools:
• Negative perceptions among teachers and
educators;
• Low graphics quality;
• Lack of adequate hardware in school;
• Lack of instructional time in for activities
involving games;
• Lack of affordance within artificial environments
to properly represent desired learning objectives;
• Lack of alignment for objectives within
commercial gaming environments to state and
local standards.
*Rice, J. W. (2007). New Media Resistance : Barriers to Implementation of Computer
Video Games in the Classroom. Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia,
16:249--261.

7. Motivation
Papa-Letras Game
Nogueira et. al.
Papa-Letras: Um Jogo de
Auxílio à Alfabetização
Infantil (SBGames 2010)

8. Specific Goals
 To develop a system that:
 Provides the ability for teachers to customize
game content;
 Contains a repository of various games, from
different disciplines;
 Would not require manual installation.
 To allow developers to define which
contents of their games
customized by teachers.
must
be

9. Related Work
 Content Games System
 Clark et. al. (2011), Embi, Z. C. (2008),
Mininel et. al. (2009).
 Customizations must follow a structure
previously defined by system´s designers.

10. PINGO
Portal of INstructional Games, Online

11. Pingo

12. Wordpress Platform
Teacher Interface
My
Students
My
Classes
Games
Insert
Student
Insert/Edit
Class
Game
Description
Students Interface
Customize
Game
Content
My
Customizati
ons
FAQ
Try Game
Edit
Customization
Monitoring
Game Developer Interface
Legend
Web page
My Games
FAQ
Navigation
My Games
Informational Table
FAQ
Gallery
Form
Game
Performance
Insert/Edit
Game
Data Visualization
Help
Game Unity Web Player

13. Pingo

14. Content Customization

15. Integrating Pingo and Unity 3D
Retrieve Customization
Insert Statistics
Pingo Database
Dataserver
Layer
Insert Statistics
Retrieve Customization
Game(Unity Web Player plugin)
(JSON Object)

16. Integrating Pingo and Unity 3D

17. Game Moderation Process
Pending
Change requested
Approved
Rejected

18. Results
 Three evaluations:
 General inspection for each user role by
specialist (Semiotic Inspection Method);
 Inspection by teachers (Intermediated
Semiotic Inspection Method);
 Informal evaluation with developers.

19. Results
 Three evaluations:
 General inspection for each user role by
specialist (Semiotic Inspection Method);
 Inspection by teachers (Intermediated
Semiotic Inspection Method);
 Informal evaluation with developers.

20. Results
Glutton Caterpillar
Game
de Lima Leão, N.
S. (2013).
Desenvolvimento
de um jogo para
auxílio ao ensino
da matemática.

21. Conclusion
 Contributions:
 Architecture for game content customization;
 Combination of technologies;
 Pingo removes the responsibility from the
game developer to create internal interfaces
at the game to allow customization.

22. Conclusion
 Future Works:
 Improvements;
 Populate Pingo with several games;
 Publish for general public.

23. Thanks!
Portal Pingo temporarily
available at:
http://homepages.dcc.ufmg.br/~denotini/pingo
Denise N. Nogueira
(denotini@dcc.ufmg.br)
Laboratório Multidisciplinar de
Pesquisa em Jogos
www.j.dcc.ufmg.br
Núcleo de Pesquisa
em Engenharia Semiótica e Interação
www.pensi.dcc.ufmg.br