The Siren project Serious games for conflict resolution

Why games? Children already familiar with first-person games –Emotion and behaviour expressed in a natural, ‘unfiltered’ manner Proven relation of games to serious concepts and learning References to games from many ICT units (TeL, eHealth, content, networked media, cognition) Dedicated conferences and journals –Trans. AI in CG, Entertainment Computing, Trans Affective Computing, etc. Gaming, personalised learning, redefinition of learning spaces and teacher-generated open content  Top 10 Global trends in ICT and Education

The main elements of Siren A serious game –With social implications –And some cutting-edge technologies That deals with conflict resolution –A major issue in today’s Europe –Both across countries and within And children/schools –At the end of the day, Siren is a technology-enhanced learning project –Which puts students in the design/evaluation loop

The main elements of Siren Solid objectives –A game which helps investigate how children handle and resolve conflicts at school –Children already familiar with game genre Puts users in the loop –Both in the design and the evaluation phase Foreseen measurable targets No need for extremely fancy technology

Design cycle Design phase just started Plan: use a fair subset of schools, not a convenient one –Better representation –Different approaches may exist also within schools, not just across them Deploy design paradigm in the UK –And then adapt it to Greece and Portugal and report on the cultural differences –Game scenario adaptivity is an open issue

Natural interaction Hot topic in affective computing in the past decade –  hot product in the gaming industry Will work with usual hardware (webcam+mic)

The SIREN people Project website: –NTUA (GR): affective user modeling, natural interaction –ITU (DK): user and behavior modeling, game AI, development, procedural quest generation, adaptation –INESC (PT): game design, narrative –UBATH (UK): user studies and requirements, evaluation, cross-cultural studies –SGI (DK): game art and development –UCSC (USA): adaptive narrative