Introduction

During and since the onslaught of the COVID-19 pandemic, many educational institutions have pivoted to online-based solutions in order to minimize the disruptive impacts of the pandemic—and future major disruptions—on teaching and learning activities (Pokhrel & Chhetri, 2021). While conventional teaching and learning activities, such as those that involve whiteboards and slideshow presentations, could be easily replaced with video conferencing solutions (e.g., ZOOM and MS Teams), the more interactive teaching activities could not be easily replaced by these solutions as they were unable to replicate the natural feel of bodily and gestural interactions. Our course on artificial intelligence in game design was one such course as it could not be easily shifted to any readily available online platforms due to its inherent need for embodied interactions in the teaching and learning process. Therefore, we had to build an in-house interactive online platform that allowed for the replication of embodied interactions in the online space; we named this platform CAVRoom, after our laboratory name—the Centre for Augmented and Virtual Reality.

In this chapter, we will use the Community of Inquiry (COI) framework to guide our reflection on how social, cognitive, and teaching presence was afforded in the use of our in-house developed online interactive game platform—CAVRoom—to teach the concepts of mechanics, design, and aesthetics (MDA) (Hunicke et al., 2004) in the Artificial Intelligence in Game Design course that was led and taught by the third author. This was a graduate elective course in the Nanyang Technological University’s School of Computer Science and Engineering. This course’s main learning outcome was to equip students with the ability to design games to simulate science/engineering problems. The average cohort size was 30–40 students, and MDA was the first topic in this one-semester long course. This session was run in a workshop format led by the third author with the technical assistance and support from the second author, who was, at the time, a post-doc staff working with the first author. In preparing this chapter, the first author collaborated with the two authors in their retrospective reflection on the pedagogical effectiveness of the lesson.

Literature Review

Teaching and Learning in the Online Space

As an emergency response to the sudden shutdown of face-to-face teaching in the first quarter of 2020, many educators around the world had to quickly shift their teaching to the online space (Meinck et al., 2022). Readily available platforms—such as learning management systems (e.g., Canvas, Blackboard), video conferencing platforms (e.g., Zoom, Skype), collaboration platforms (e.g., Microsoft Teams), and educational suites (e.g., Google Classroom)—quickly became a first option for many (Saha et al., 2022). While these online venues made the continuity of education provision possible in such a difficult time, teaching and learning in this digital space (particularly when conducted asynchronously) has frequently been associated with many limitations, such as lack of motivation (Huang & Wang, 2022), engagement (Hollister et al., 2022), and interaction (Baczek et al., 2021) as well as feelings of isolation (Wilczewski et al., 2021), which eventually led to a decrease in academic performance in many cases (Engzell et al., 2021). Compared to face-to-face learning, online learning seems to be less engaging for many students, particularly when it comes to collaboration, student-teacher interactions, and peer discussions (Beckwith, 2020), and more so in the asynchronous mode (Beckwith, 2020). In many cases, this is attributable to the lack of a sense of community in this mode of learning (Chatterjee & Correia, 2020).

Given the direct correlation between students’ engagement and academic performance (Lei et al., 2018), it is essential to create a sense of community in online learning. Our in-house platform—CAVRoom—afforded such a sense of community through social, cognitive, and teaching presence, from a transformative paradigm.

Community of Inquiry

The COI framework is perhaps one of the most relevant approaches to understanding the mechanisms of online learning. Originally developed as a method to understand computer-mediated communication (Garrison et al., 1999), the COI framework is grounded in collaborative constructivism and offers a structured approach to understanding the impact of learning environments on the cognitive processes of the participants (Garrison, 2015).

The COI framework is tripartite, comprising cognitive, social, and teaching presence. The first element, cognitive presence, refers to the extent of the participants’ ability in making meaning and constructing knowledge through the discourse shared by the critical community of inquiry. Operationalized as a four-stage model of Practical Inquiry (PI)—which is a recursive process of exploration, integration, and resolution in critical thinking and meaning construction (Garrison et al., 2001)—cognitive presence is often considered as the most fundamental to academic success but is also likely the most difficult one to achieve in online learning (Garrison & Arbaugh, 2007).

Similarly, social presence is another challenging aspect of online learning. This second element of the COI framework refers to the sense of belonging resulting from identifying and communicating with the group and developing personal/emotional relationship through imbuing an online persona with the real person’s characteristics (Garrison, 2016). As the most researched element of the three in the COI framework, social presence has been shown to have a strong correlation with learning outcomes and learners’ satisfaction (Guo et al., 2021; Hostetter & Busch, 2013).

However, the extent of this correlation is mediated by instructor facilitation (d’Alessio et al., 2019), which is the third element of the COI framework, i.e., the teaching presence. Teaching presence consists of three dimensions of teacher responsibilities: instructional design and organization, discourse facilitation, and direct instruction. It is the bridge between the first and second elements of this framework, and the key to a successful COI (Garrison, 2016).

The COI framework aligns with our transformative research paradigm, as this framework’s co-construction of meaning in knowledge formation is epistemologically central in this framework and the multifaceted realities of classroom experience is co-constructed by both teachers and learners as the participants in this collaborative process.

Gamification and Embodied Learning

Identified as innovative pedagogy in Paniagua and Istance (2018), both gamification and embodied learning are often used in education to enhance students’ learning experience. Gamification refers to the integration of game elements and principles into educational contexts to make learning more interactive and enjoyable for students, thus fostering a deeper understanding of the material (Dichev & Dicheva, 2017). In a meta-analysis conducted by Sailer and Homner (2020), gamification in learning is shown to have impacts on cognitive, motivational, and behavioural learning outcomes. In particular, it correlates positively with students’ engagement (Hamari et al., 2016) and contributes to students’ social, cognitive, and teaching presence development in the online learning space (KiliÇ, 2023).

Similarly, embodied learning is shown to strengthen the sense of social presence , which helps students overcome feelings of isolation in online learning (Chen, 2022). Embodied learning involves active participation and physical engagement in the learning process, allowing students to experience concepts through movement and sensory activities. This approach emphasizes the connection between body and mind, facilitating a holistic understanding of the material. Proponents of this pedagogy argue that due to the embodied nature of cognition, using bodily movements in learning allows for the creation of multimodal representations of sensorimotor experience in the brain, which enhances understanding and facilitates learning (Shapiro & Stolz, 2019). Hence, embodied learning is frequently used as a powerful pedagogy to strengthen cognitive presence.

Our Innovative Solution: CAVRoom

CAVRoom is an in-house developed sandbox card gaming online platform, which allows multiple players to have the freedom to manipulate playing cards together. In this course, we developed CAVRoom based on the Heart Attack game’s rules (see Lim, 2017 for an example of this game).

Rationale of the Innovation

Concepts such as the mechanics-dynamics-aesthetics (MDA) of games need to be taught through playing the real game, without which a practical understanding of these concepts is difficult to achieve. Before the pandemic, these games, such as the Heart Attack card game (which is a fast-paced game where players must use a bodily response—i.e., to slap the dealt card—when the number shown on the card corresponds to the running count), took place in face-to-face settings where students played in groups. They played several rounds of this game until they became familiar with the game rules before proceeding to analyse the MDA of the game. They then played a variant of this game where the rules were modified. After this second variant of the gameplay, they proceeded to analyse the MDA of this variant and discuss the differences between these two versions of the game. Through these two variations of the game, students were then able to understand the application of the MDA concepts and appreciate their importance in game design.

When the pandemic hit, we had to move our classes online, in line with the restrictions introduced in response to the pandemic (Ng, 2021). Considering the nature of interactions in the game simulations, we quickly agreed that we were unable to achieve the desired interactions in readily available platforms such as ZOOM, as these platforms were quite limited in terms of enabling physical-digital component relationships, despite their efforts in improving natural interactions through features like video annotation (Domova et al., 2014) and gestures (Amores et al., 2015). Therefore, we built our own platform, CAVRoom, which could mimic the real-life game simulations and hence was able to address the sudden change in teaching modes in response to the pandemic.

Description of the Innovation

CAVRoom is an innovative solution that will enhance the teaching and learning process in the digital space through more natural interaction (Tandianus et al., 2021). The innovative aspects of CAVRoom include the following:

1. Strong link between physical-digital components: We built CAVRoom in such a way as to maintain the physical actions that students would do in real-world gameplay as much as possible and keep a straightforward and direct correspondence between physical actions in the real world and digital actions in our CAVRoom. For instance, players can use a touchscreen (or their mouse) to manipulate cards, such as by picking up, moving, or flipping them In the physical version of the game, the players are required to touch their foreheads before slapping the card—in CAVRoom, it is replaced with clicking the bell button on the right-hand side of the screen.
2. Configurability: CAVRoom is a virtual reality (VR) platform that can be configured to non-immersive modes (i.e., to be experienced without a VR headset, such as on a conventional monitor) as well as immersive modes (i.e., to be experienced with a VR headset). For its use in the Artificial Intelligence in Game Design course reported in this chapter, CAVRoom was configured to be in the non-immersive mode as the cards in the game being played in this course were thin and flat objects for which a 3D immersive version did not add value to the intended learning.
3. Sandbox: In most existing card games (e.g., Solitaire, FreeCell), the possible interactions are hardcoded, i.e., the users can only put the cards in predefined zones. In CAVRoom, however, the players have the freedom to place the cards anywhere on the virtual table. Due to this sandbox characteristic, CAVRoom can be used for various card game activities beyond the Heart Attack game. Moreover, CAVRoom can be easily extended to other disciplines as the cards can be easily used as a proxy for anything. For instance, CAVRoom can be used to teach human anatomy, where each card can represent a 3D human organ, etc.
4. Platform-agnostic: CAVRoom is a highly accessible system as it supports various platforms—including Windows, MacOS, Android, and iOS devices—thanks to the versatility of the tool we used to develop it. By being able to run it across multiple platforms, we minimize the possibility of students being left out due to not owning a compatible device, hence ensuring inclusivity. CAVRoom allows users from multiple platforms to share the same virtual space and manipulate the virtual objects in the virtual space, regardless of which platforms they join in from (see Figure 13.1), which promotes social presence.

Reflection

In this chapter, we use the COI framework to reflect on our experience, which we collected through a semi-structured interview conversation between the instructor and the authorial team of this chapter, in delivering the lesson on MDA through CAVRoom. We will also discuss the instructor’s perceived ease of lesson delivery through this platform and the challenges we faced in the implementation of this CAVRoom-based workshop.

Social, Cognitive, and Teaching Presence

Prior to the pandemic, this session of the class had always been well received by students, who noted that the session was interesting and engaging, due to the interactivity in the immersive gameplay experience that offered social presence through the group cohesion and communication in the gameplay. In teaching this class during the pandemic, where social presence was severely impacted by the physical restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 regulations, we leveraged the technological affordances through the ability to replicate the physical and bodily interactions (for example, the action of slapping the card was replaced by the action of hitting a button) in CAVRoom. Students logged into CAVRoom from their homes, joined a game room, and played the card game with their classmates. During the gameplay, they interacted with each other through the chat function in CAVRoom as well as the voice call (which ran simultaneously via Zoom). This created a sense of social presence for the students.

During the gameplay in CAVRoom, students engaged with the game cognitively and physically through embodied actions, such as dealing the cards, hitting the bell, etc. These embodied actions were designed such that the students learned the MDA concepts in action through this embodied learning. For example, they needed to slap the dealt card by hitting the bell button on the right-hand side (see Figure 13.1). Such an embodied action was part of the aesthetics of the game, which is component A of the MDA concepts. Through embodied learning, which we successfully moved to CAVRoom, students experienced cognitive presence while learning the MDA concepts.

Through CAVRoom, students experienced not only the social presence in the group dynamics during the gameplay and cognitive presence through experiencing the MDA concepts in action but also teaching presence through the monitoring of the gameplay in real-time by the instructor, which would have otherwise been difficult due to the non-physical lesson setting. In fact, one main advantage of the use of CAVRoom in this lesson was the strengthening of teaching presence. In using CAVRoom, the instructor was able to monitor (or even record, for review purposes) the whole class owing to the availability of a spectator mode option in CAVRoom as well as the use of a large display to project all virtual rooms at once (see Figure 13.2). Such simultaneous attention was not possible in the physical class setting, where the instructor had to go around the groups in the class to monitor their gameplay. However, with the use of CAVRoom, which was projected onto a large display, the instructor was able to view all groups at once. Students were also able to ask questions when the instructor entered/joined their virtual rooms. This strengthened the teaching presence in our online CAVRoom class. Students expressed positive feelings toward their learning experience in CAVRoom, noting that they were thankful to have had CAVRoom as an alternative avenue that enabled them to play the card game online, which they would otherwise have missed out on.

Instructor’s Perceived Ease of Lesson Delivery

We did not notice much difference between the face-to-face class and the online class via CAVRoom in terms of the ease of lesson delivery. In retrospect, we reckoned this was because the students had had a semester of experience with online learning by the time our class was in-session. Students would have been familiar with digital platforms and the norms of online learning. In delivering our lesson, we noticed that students brought over their prior knowledge of digital platforms and seamlessly applied it in our class. Students were able to interact with their peers and with the instructor. In the class discussion following the gameplay, the instructor was able to elicit students’ responses that prompted them to connect their gameplay experience in CAVRoom with the key concepts in the lesson, engaging students cognitively in their learning. Similar to any Zoom lectures/tutorials, we also experienced slight time lags in students’ responses, but this did not impact the class progress. Hence, in our reflection, we did not note any significant problems in the ease of lesson delivery. One caveat we would like to note is that when we ran this CAVRoom lesson for the first time, we required assistance from our research assistants to set up the network and get the platform and display ready. We believe that with further improvements, CAVRoom could be more user-friendly and take less technical skills to set up when running it for the first time.

Challenges in Implementation

In terms of the implementation of our platform, we noticed a small hiccup. While the procedure on how to connect to the platform was given to the students prior to the day of the class session, the actual game was only unveiled at the beginning of the session for the pedagogical rationale of gauging the students’ spontaneity while playing the game without prior preparation. Therefore, the students would have not been very familiar with the game interface prior to the class session. On the day of the class, we noticed that students took time to get familiar with the user interface of the platform. For example, it took them a few minutes to work out which button on their keyboard corresponded to which function in the platform, etc. In retrospect, this could partially be due to the rather rudimentary design in this first version of CAVRoom, which was put together rather hurriedly as an emergency response to the need for online teaching in the pandemic. We believe that a more polished version of CAVRoom could improve the user interface design (for example, through a more intuitive button-function correspondence) and offer a smoother experience for students.

Conclusion

We contend that CAVRoom, which was started as an ‘emergency response to educational disruption,’ mitigated the impacts of the sudden change to the online mode on students’ learning. This platform afforded and facilitated a community of inquiry for our students. It provided them with a venue for social presence through the online synchronous team interaction, for cognitive presence through embodied learning in the gameplay within this platform, and for teaching presence through the simultaneous monitoring of the gameplay as well as the live discussion in the workshop. Given the characteristics of the modern-day digital-native generations of students, we are optimistic that our digital and online platform, CAVRoom, has good potential to be further refined to suit post-pandemic education.

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Media Attributions

All images in this chapter have been created by the author, unless otherwise noted below.