News
AlbaSim at Ludovia#CH
April 2019
AlbaSim is well represented at the Ludovia#CH conference, as a speaker at the round table “Game as a miracle cure for education?” (J. Hulaas), by the co-presidency of the scientific committee (D. Jaccard), as co-author of two presentations “Conception collaborative du jeu Péroll’ard ” and “Co-conception d’un jeu d’apprentissage de la programmation” (D. Jaccard, J. Hulaas) and by the animation of an ExplorCamp “A serious game for the introduction to HES studies” (D. Jaccard, G. Maksay).
Frankfurt – Train The Trainer
April 2019
As part of the H2020 MBenefits project, AlbaSim was in Frankfurt to co-moderate the Train The Trainer on the use of the MBenefits serious game.
The trainers, representing Germany, Italy, Greece, Portugal, Portugal, Poland, Belgium and Switzerland, were able to test and evaluate the english version of the serious game.
(…)
On the basis of the trainers’ positive evaluations, the process of content translation into French, German, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Greek and Dutch will begin.
First in-class use of the PACT programming game
February 2019
This first session brought together 22 students from the Gymnase intercantonal de la Broye (Switzerland) and made it possible to verify the adequacy of the PACT programming game with the expectations and capacities of students of this age.
(…)
The teacher in charge of the programming course had added a few exercises of his own to the game. Feedback from the students confirmed that the game was fun to use and motivating. Some areas of improvement were identified and quickly corrected.
What we do…
Our activities include both research and development related to Serious Games for educational purposes.
Research
Our research activities includes creating development methods and tools for serious games, pedagogical innovation linked with serious games, learning analytics and behavior analysis, impacts of serious games on the learning process.
Serious games
A Serious Game is a computer application that combines a serious intention, of an educational, informative or training nature with playful mechanics from the worlds of video games and computer simulations.
Research Projects
Emergency Game – A serious game to evaluate the impact of environmental distractors on the performance of emergency triage
In the emergency department, triage decisions have a direct impact on patients’ survival rates. However, studies have found significant differences in nurses’ attribution of emergency degrees, with major consequences on patient management. (…) Among the factors that could explain the cause of these discrepancies, distractors in the work environment such as noise or task interruptions were highlighted but did not benefit from specific investigations, particularly due to the difficulty of evaluating them in real healthcare environments. Therefore, in this project, we will develop and use a serious game in order to reproduces a work environment with distractors and provide a unique opportunity to explore their impacts on the quality of triage in emergency departments. This study will provide a better understanding of the contribution of the work environment to safe care. Partners: Institut et Haute Ecole de santé La Source, Hôpitaux Universitaires de Genève (HUG)
H2020 : M-Benefits (2018)
Industrial and service sectors offers potential for cost-effective energy-savings. But under-investment in energy-efficiency is observed in all EU countries. This is called the «energy-efficiency gap».
(…)
The goal of this Horizon 2020 European Project is to train energy experts to evaluate all effects of energy efficiency measures. This work will contribute to increase attractiveness of energy projects and to reduce the energy-efficiency gap.
In this project, AlbaSim is the task leader for the development of the serious games that will be used for training of energy-efficiency experts and for results dissemination.
Partners: European Commission – Horizon 2020
Collaborations
We conduct AR&D projects in collaboration with academic partners ranging from pedagogical research centers to natural language processing.
LIP – Laboratoire d’Innovation Pédagogique (UniFr)
Joint research projects in the area of learning analytics and education in computational thinking.
La Source, Institut et Haute Ecole de la Santé
Collaboration on the development of serious games for education and research in nursing sciences.