Massively multiplayer online games as new vectors for international cooperation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 2019, ESG (UQAM, https://esg.uqam.ca/) and IAE Gustave Eiffel (UPEC, https://www.iae-eiffel.fr/) decided to design a joint international project management course. The pedagogical objectives were numerous: working in remote teams, working in a multicultural setting, broadening access to international exchanges and offering engaging creative challenges. The health crisis that began in 2020 accelerated the project. Indeed, we experimented several first national courses as early as June 2020 in order to verify the technical and pedagogical feasibility of the project. Initially, we successfully tried Microsoft's Minecraft Education Edition video game. Indeed, Minecraft is a game of pure creativity like LEGO® bricks. There are no scripting constraints. The construction is therefore totally free (sandbox) and the world is composed of blocks that can be destroyed and repositioned endlessly (mining). Crafting is the ability that allows players to design objects or materials not present in their raw state in the world (tools, glass, etc.). Minecraft Education Edition (https://education.minecraft.net/) offers specific functionalities for teachers to facilitate its integration in the classroom. Unfortunately, major constraints quickly became apparent: Minecraft requires rather high computer configurations, the game must be launched on the teacher's workstation to be accessible by students and, above all, the virtual world can only host thirty people simultaneously. In an international context, these constraints were blocking and we then tested the free and open source equivalent of Minecraft: Minetest (https://www.minetest.net/). This game removes all the constraints of Minecraft: the necessary computer configurations are light, the persistent world is accessible via a dedicated 24/7 server and it is possible to integrate more than one hundred participants. Technical tests with small groups were carried out from September to November 2020. The server was fully operational in January 2021 and the first French courses in the world of Minetest began. On 15 February 2021, with colleagues from five universities (India, Ukraine, Germany, France and Canada), we started a first international experiment, unique in the world, involving thirty-six students and ten teachers. The objective was mainly technical in order to ensure that the server would hold the load on an uninterrupted use for almost two months. This technical success will enable us to achieve our initial objectives and to propose to the participants of this experimentation the design of international courses or projects (project management, management, creativity, etc.) for the academic year 2021-2022 and thus propose an innovative modality of university cooperation.The use of MMOs in higher education is part of the EdUTeam learning and research project in game-oriented learning (https://eduteam.fr/) carried out at the Institut de Recherche en Gestion (IRG, EA 2354). This project started in 2016 and is intended to study the value of commercial of the shelf leisure games in higher education. It comprises three sub-projects: EdUTeam Role Playing Games, EdUTeam Wargames and EdUTeam Video Games.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.022 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".