Blended Game-Based Learning Environments: Extending a Serious Game into a Learning Content Management System

Serious games have recognized potential as a means to tackle many challenges in education, ranging from stimulating increased learner motivation, to transferring challenging concepts in a novel and engaging form. They are commonly shown to work most effectively in blended approaches to learning, whereby the game plays a core role in a wider pedagogic approach, often based around an experiential or exploratory model. In this paper, we explore how the integration of a serious game, and more generally gaming paradigms, can be extended to a learning content management system (LCMS) to support a blended and holistic approach to their use in education. Through a case study within the EU-Funded Adaptive Learning via Intuitive/Interactive, Collaborative and Emotional Systems (ALICE) project, we demonstrate a technical integration of a gaming engine with a proprietary LCMS, and discuss the broader pedagogic benefits of such an approach. In particular, we note how this method can support an ´intuitive guided´ or scaffolded approach to learning, where the learner is given the potential to explore a non-linear learning environment, whilst scaffolding and blending provides the guidance towards ensuring targeted learning objectives are met.