ovos (http://www.ovos.at/en) is an Austrian company that creates learning applications, serious learning games, and gamified online services for corporate and educational clients. Their goal is to design products that motivate people to engage in them and, at the same time, learn sustainable skills. To achieve this goal, ovos developed the OVOS PLAY GameDesigner, which offers the following features.
Team Development: OVOS PLAY suite provides a gamified learning platform featuring the OVOS PLAY GameDesigner that allows teams of faculty, graphic designers, instructional designers, and others to work together instantly online to develop interactive digital scenarios. The games develop around images, scenarios, actions, and non-linear dialogues that develop according to choices made by students.
Real-Time Collaboration: The team can work together online in real-time, simultaneously developing, assessing, and modifying the scenario, using text, video, animation, or any digital content from any source to create effective game-based learning modules.
Device and Operating System Independent: Scenarios, authored with the OVOS PLAY GameDesigner, can be edited and viewed in every modern browser on any platform or device – from PC to tablet or phone. A real-time preview shows the scenario on the target device while being edited simultaneously on any other platform.
Building Blocks: The OVOS PLAY GameDesigner offers a wide range of pre-defined templates and components and at the same time provides simple building blocks for custom authoring.
Language Learning: ovos developed a serious game for German language learning for the Goethe Institute. “Lern Deutsch” can be found at http://www.ovos.at/portfolio/146,sprachlernspiel-lern-deutsch.html
OVOS PLAY Gamified Learning System: The OVOS PLAY Gamified Learning System is a lightweight, gamified learning management system. Students can be awarded points or badges, and statistics on group and individual progress are provided.
Jochen Kranzer, Managing Partner, Ovos Media
The Promise of Gamified Learning: Jochen Kranzer, Managing Partner of ovos, describes the promise of game-based learning as the ability to transfer the joy and motivation of playing games to learning activities. The essential factors of gameplay – feedback, autonomy, social connectedness, and purpose – are the key intrinsic motivators to be integrated. This can be supplemented with external elements, such as points and badges.
The ovos Approach: Jochen sees gamification at the “threshold of professionalism.” ovos produces what he describes as “serious games”, conveying content beyond playfulness. The key is having game mechanics seamlessly integrated into learning content, instead of learn first, and as a reward, play later.
Challenges to Game-based Learning: When considering the major challenges facing game-based learning, Jochen focuses on two key issues:
- High production costs; and
- The need for more evidence supporting the transfer of the learning experience from the game to the real world.
For more Information:
Gerald Henzinger
Business Development – Learning at ovos
[email protected]
http://www.ovos.at/en
