The Serious Game Modeling Language ATTAC-L Applied to Reach Out Central (ROC): Findings and Recommendations
ATTAC-L is a domain specific modeling language developed to facilitate non-technical people (people without a programming background) to express the narrative content (“story”) of educational games as formal descriptions in the context of cyber bulling prevention domain. In addition, the ATTAC-L language is extended to model the pedagogical aspects of serious games. However, the current modeling concepts provided to the modeler for modeling the educational aspects are very general; they do not belong to specific learning theory.
The aim of this thesis is to verify the generality of the ATTAC-L language and when needed to propose extensions or adaptations. For this purpose, we investigate an existing educational video game named Reach Out Central (ROC) in this dissertation. ROC is mainly standing on the principles of cognitive behavior theory (CBT) to enhance mental health of youngsters (J. Burns, Webb, Durkin A, & Hickie, 2010).
The story part of ROC is modeled by means of ATTAC-L to indicate how this language has the capability to describe the narrative of a serious game belonging to other domain not only cyber bulling.
Moreover, the pedagogical aspects of ROC are modeled on top of the story in more generic way with respect to CBT. Social Cognitive Theory (SCT) is also considered in this thesis because it is an important behavior change theory in health educational video games.