Mobile Games as Support for Digital Design Students

by Yann Tambellini, Stéphanie Philippe, Valérie Radelet

How can a gamified learning application for mobile phones be used to assist students to focus on the content in the classroom and support them at home?

CREASUP DIGITAL has recently been launched to train future digital design professionals. Its uniqueness is the focus on professional competences and knowledge. There are no books, no notebooks and every evening the students are invited to complete new activities in a mobile app to consolidate the knowledge they learned that day.
The app offers a set of various training activities: mini games, articles, videos, quizzes, flash cards. These help to break down the content into small units that trainers design according to their pedagogic objectives.

Trainees are encouraged to complete the activities to collect badges and can monitor their progress in the leader board. The app also supports the daily communication with the students and can be used to share information or updates. Further it can be used to conduct surveys and collect feedback.
The mobile app appears to be a flexible and useful tool to revitalise the school year, and has proven particularly relevant in the context of the hygiene requirements of 2020.

The main purpose of making the app available to students was the provision of support for their training, especially for teaching theories and backgrounds. Practical subjects, such as using dedicated software for content creation are addressed via hands-on sessions to enable direct experience.
The mobile application has been useful to support teachers’ communication with students.
Our target users are first year students of the Discovery program (a total of 45 participants). At school, students have theory lessons, supported by slides. They are asked not to take any notes during the courses and the slides are not sent at the end of the courses. At home, students are invited to use our mobile app. Generally, five activities are recommended each day. The content provided corresponds with the topics introduced at school; additional content was added for students to discover further topics. Topics include Hardware, Design, 2D-3D, Production, Innovation, Business, English, Professional life.
Quizzes are used as formal assessment instruments to regularly evaluate the progression of participating students. News and Surveys are used to communicate with students and get their feedback about various activities.
The use of the gamified mobile app as a supplement to school-based training has shown the following advantages: The courses are generally easy and smooth. The students are motivated by the leader board and challenge each other as well as their trainer. News and surveys create interactions with the students. The app also helps to identify questions and topics that learners find particularly difficult, which can consequently be given more attention in class.