Blending context-aware challenges into learning environments

There is a growing expectation for educational environments to be more flexible and more engaging, not only for students, but also for teachers. Project-based Learning and cooperative learning have emerged as opportunities to create motivating learning contexts that focus on teaching students how to find information, how to test the information they have discovered, and then how to apply that information in a creative way for a specific purpose. Moreover, it is important to consider that students, once integrated into the work force, are not individual performers. Key skills have evolved to a blend of competencies that range from STEM skills to social ones. It is equally important that students explore the skills that are not part of the standard curriculum and they learn how to collaborate, how to be self-aware, how to empathize, how to work out conflicts and so on. However, creating such rich learning contexts requires extra efforts from teachers, and existing educational tools still need to become more user friendly to encourage actual adoption. Even if opportunities for innovation exist, these have not been fully exploited and large-scale implementations remain an issue. This paper explores the added-value that context-aware services can bring to education and presents the construction process of context-based gamified learning paths that support multi-skill acquisition. The implementation is supported by an Authoring Tool for Context-aware Challenges (AT-CC) and minigames developed within the BEACONING Project. AT-CC is a tool that enables teachers, acting as learning designers, to create metagames, which are pervasive, game-driven experiences that increase student motivation and engagement. The metagames created with the AT-CC tool integrate minigames into the context-based experiences, so, when students are playing, they have the opportunity to enhance their knowledge and skills. Teachers can easily customize both the context-aware paths and the minigames to create new experiences adapted to new locations and specific learning objectives.