A model Driven Architecture MDA Approach to facilitate Serious Game Integration in an e-learning environment
Résumé
Serious games development has increased remarkably in recent years. Serious games provide motivation, dynamism and attractiveness so they have been more and more integrated into e-learning environments. This integration involves the creation of adapted and entertaining scenarios resulting from gamification of learning processes and eventually industrial processes. These playful scenarios are generally executed thanks to a serious game environment but they should also be integrated more broadly in the global learning paths. The creation and integration of serious games represents an expensive process in terms of time and funding. A conventionally simplified approach consisted in using standards. A lot of standards exists for the pedagogical scenarios. Unfortunately there is almost none defined for gamification and/or playful scenario integration in order to reuse its elements. In this article, we propose a contribution that offers a suitable design and smooth integration of playful scenarios into learning environments by (re)using existing standards and an engineering model driven approach. Specifically, we use the methodology proposed by the OMG MDA. Several e-learning standards have been proposed such as LOM, SCORM and IMS-LD. LOM is a standard used for describing interoperable and reusable learning objects to be able to exchange information. These standards are not capable of representing all of the serious game aspects as they neglect the fun aspects such as the type of the game, motivation and integration aspect of the games in e-learning environments. However, several studies propose metadata schemes based on the LOM standard to describe serious games (LOMFR-SG, SG-LOM). From these two approaches, we propose a generic enriched description of metadata for serious games in order to characterize a generic meta-model. This meta-model is then another design level independent from any implementation (level CIM MDA). Then, according to MDA, we propose a meta-model for our generic platform Learning Adventure and Claroline Connect platform. This meta-model is thus the level of implementation of our scenarios (PSM). Finally, we propose some transformation rules (ATL) and some constraints (OCL) to transform a generic scenario in accordance with the proposed meta model CIM, into a specific model that can be implemented in the Adventure Learning platforms and Claroline Connect.