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Breaking Educational Barriers with Contextualised, Pervasive and Gameful Learning (BEACONING)

Funder

European Union, Horizon 2020

Total value of project

€5,902,772.13

Value to Coventry University

784,987.50

beaconing logo

Project team

Professor Sylvester Arnab, Professor Katherine Wimpenny, Koula Charitonos, Dr Luca Morini, Jayne Beaufoy, Aikaterini Bourazeri

Duration of project

01/01/16 - 30/04/19


Project overview

BEACONING’s concept is to digitally enable play-learn in everyday spaces fostering cross-subject learning, facilitated by personified gamified lesson plan where context-aware educational resources and ad-hoc learning in the surrounding environment can be triggered. BEACONING pragmatically addresses the needs of disabled learners, who are engaging with general education.

Project objectives

BEACONING sets a forefront in multifaceted education technologies through large-scale piloting of a digital learning platform that blend physical and digital spaces. As innovation action strategies, pilots combine opportunities for new ICTs in multiple ways that merge learning acquired in formal, non-formal and informal means, developing the skills for today’s abled and disabled learners and workforce. The BEACONING platform will be a ubiquitous solution that exploits advances in user experience design, mobile communication, location-based and context aware systems, procedural content generation, pedagogy-driven gamification, learning analytics and cloud technology through innovative integration towards a blended learning space.

The BEACONING demonstrator will facilitate, assess and author gamified learning activities, integrating existing educational tools and services of the participating organisations. Focusing on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics), the cross-subject approach embedded in a Problem-Based Learning model will contextualise learning within real world problem solving and applications.

    1. To integrate technologies, pedagogical and social perspectives of using pervasive, context-aware and gamified approaches: ensuring that the BEACONING platform is innovative while also extending our scientific understanding and practice-based experiments of engaging a community of learners including those with disabilities with a more inclusive, connected and contextualised learning process.
    2. To develop, implement and validate the BEACONING platform: that leverages cutting-edge approaches including the Future Internet technology, mobile, gamification, pervasive gaming, procedural game content generation, game authoring, human-computer interfaces, learning analytics and problem-based learning model; and to produce a platform that is usable, adaptable, extendable and sustainable.
    3. To explore and measure the level of engagement, effectiveness and impact that is enabled by the BEACONING platform: towards incentivising learners and fostering acquisition and transfer of knowledge and skills, validate this through large scale pilots involving a community of stakeholders and practitioners in Europe, and provide an exploitation and business plan for the platform adoption.
  • https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/687676 

    https://beaconing.eu 

    https://zenodo.org/communities/beaconing_eu/?page=1&size=20 

    https://beaconing.eu/downloads/ 

    https://www.coventry.ac.uk/research/about-us/research-news/2020/gamification-awards-for-beaconing-and-gamechangers/

    The Gamification Awards are the global awards for gamification, celebrating the leading examples of gamification practitioners' projects and applications each year. The Beaconing platform - a software that was developed in the EU H2020 Beaconing project led by Prof. Sylvester Arnab is the winner of the Software award for 2019.

 Queen’s Award for Enterprise Logo
University of the year shortlisted
QS Five Star Rating 2023