Puzzle‐Based Games as a Metaphor for Designing in Situ Learning Activities.

In situ learning activities are recently becoming of higher interest in education because they facilitate contextualized learning experiences. A particular case is the creation of learning routes containing geo‐located questions. In this line, teachers are increasingly more interested in getting involved in the design of such learning experiences according to their specific needs. QuesTInSitu is a mobile application that supports the creation of questions that have to be answered in the real location. Previous research experiments reported educational benefits of carrying out this type of activities and highlighted the requirement of incorporating mechanisms that promote problem solving and students’ motivation. Games and educational puzzles are considered interesting and feasible approaches to address these goals. On the one hand, puzzle‐based games are especially suitable to feasibly involve teachers as designers of the games. On the other hand, this type of games can promote engagement in the subject topics, while fostering students’ problem solving, analytical and memory skills. Therefore, this paper proposes a puzzle‐based game metaphor as an innovative way to design gamified in situ learning activities. A game design task, completed by secondary education teachers, has been carried out to evaluate the proposed puzzle‐based game metaphor. In order to computationally represent and enact the designed gamified in situ learning activity following the proposed metaphor, a new version of the QuesTInSitu has been developed. Evaluation results show that teachers are able of using the metaphor to design potentially fruitful gamified in situ learning activities according to their educational objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]