**Irene Vargianniti <sup>1</sup> and Kostas Karpouzis 2,\***


Received: 25 September 2020; Accepted: 14 October 2020; Published: 22 October 2020

**Abstract:** The goal of this paper is to utilize available big and open data sets to create content for a board and a digital game and implement an educational environment to improve students' familiarity with concepts and relations in the data and, in the process, academic performance and engagement. To this end, we used Wikipedia data to generate content for a Monopoly clone called Geopoly and designed a game-based learning experiment. Our research examines whether this game had any impact on the students' performance, which is related to identifying implied ranking and grouping mechanisms in the game, whether performance is correlated with interest and whether performance differs across genders. Student performance and knowledge about the relationships contained in the data improved significantly after playing the game, while the positive correlation between student interest and performance illustrated the relationship between them. This was also verified by a digital version of the game, evaluated by the students during the COVID-19 pandemic; initial results revealed that students found the game more attractive and rewarding than a traditional geography lesson.

**Keywords:** big data; open data; game-based learning; education; geography; board games; monopoly

## **1. Introduction**

## *1.1. Big Data in (and for) Education*

In recent years, the abundance of online learning solutions both for children and adults has increased interest in taking advantage of the data they create. Data related to school attendance, performance, engagement and other factors are too big to handle using conventional processing techniques; in addition to this, they offer the opportunity to identify relationships and trends, which may not be otherwise evident, using data mining algorithms. As a result, the field of data analytics seems to be the most appropriate means to exploit them [1], mostly to predict student performance or interest [2], visualize information in a dashboard [3], either for school usage or for policy makers [4] or even to identify cognitive states in real-time, such as interest and fatigue [5]. In this context, ethics awareness becomes of the essence, since data mining, especially in social media, has been criticized as a channel which caters for targeted advertising and may promote dubious behavioral shifts; given that big data effectively expands the scope of educational measurement [6], it is important to educate young students about the underlying mechanics, the source of available big data (not necessarily related to education) and the means to easily collect meaningful and dependable data sets. In our work, we utilize a Game-Based Learning (GBL) approach to educate young students not only with respect to a specific school course, but also about the relationships between different entities from a Big Data set; this is also of great importance, in order to ensure that Big Data can be used and interpreted correctly [7–9].

World geography provides a handy introduction to Big Data for young students, since it incorporates diverse solitary information (e.g., Points of Interest, names of persons, etc.) and relational data, such as population and size; the latter is of major importance, since it can be used to illustrate ranking and grouping concepts between different entities (mainly countries or continents). Research shows that geographical education fosters critical thinking and increases environmental awareness [10–12]. Such skills can be cultivated by playing games, since cooperation, communication and critical thinking flourish in a playful environment, while games highly engage players and motivate the students [13–15]. Game-based learning [16] is designed to balance the content and mechanics of the game with the players' ability to transfer the concepts described in the game to the real world [17]; Prensky reports ([18]) that education and play are, indeed, interrelated. Conventional learning offers rich educational content, but little involvement, as opposed to games that sometimes promote fun, entertainment and flow, in exchange for reusable, transferable knowledge [19]. Moreover, the narrative of a game is manifested through goals and objectives that students have to accomplish in order to progress and succeed in it. Engagement is associated with learning outcomes [20–22] and motivation is considered games' fundamental elements [23]. Therefore, the game design process must be thorough, in order to engage and motivate students [24,25]. Even though literature reports quite a few examples of games having a positive effect on learning [26], this is not always the case [20]. Interest and fun can go hand in hand with learning, if we integrate educational games in the classroom, regardless of the students age group [27–30]. Today's generation have the unique opportunity to go beyond traditional means of education [31], hence, educators should use games to make learning fun and exciting but also more effective.

#### *1.2. Monopoly as a Serious Game*

Monopoly is one of the five most popular board games, licensed in more than 100 countries and printed in 37 languages [32]. Hasbro has produced or licensed different versions for cities, towns and regions and even for TV shows and Hollywood films. Custom-made Monopoly sets even played a role in World War II, when the British Secret Intelligence Service cooperated with the game's UK manufacturer to include genuine maps, compasses are real money, instead of the game's items, to sets delivered to prisoners via the Red Cross. Even though it is mostly considered an entertainment game, it was designed as an educational game, back in the early 20th century, by American game designer and author Elizabeth "Lizzie" Magie. Magie believed in the ideas of Henry George, an American political economist and journalist, who thought that land and natural resources should belong to the people who rent them, but never own them. Her game, called "Landlord's Game" consisted of a board with different properties, each with the distinct purchase price and rental value: in this context, the government charges tax not on profit or labor, but on the possession of land and whatever profit people can create through the investment of accumulated capital stays with them. Landlord's Game was initially rejected by one of the leading game manufacturers in the U.S. and was finally published by Parker Brothers in 1935, under the name "Monopoly" [33].

Monopoly employs several game objects and mechanics that associate them, the most prominent of which includes investing in property and re-using collected rent to build houses and hotels to increase the value of rent collected by visitors. In addition to property deeds, which correspond to street names in most Hasbro editions, players may invest in railroad stations and utility companies; as is the case with street properties, collecting more of the same kind increases the rent collected by visitors, along with the owner's chances of winning. Some of the squares in the board correspond to Chance cards, which may entail players paying taxes (players who have invested in many properties may be hurt substantially) or fund collection (redistribution of wealth) or even send players to Jail, where no rent can be collected by visitors in their properties. Chance cards, along with the use of dice that provide how many squares each player advances in each round, introduce a chance element; despite that, the dominant strategy to increase a player's chances of winning is to move early, invest in many properties and try to save funds to invest in more expensive properties, usually positioned

towards the end of the boards. In general, positioning of street properties on the board implies a ranking mechanism: the price to invest in each property increases as one moves along the board and, in turn, the rent collected by visitors and, hence, the player's return on investment, increases as well [34].

#### *1.3. The Monopoly Game in Education*

The original properties and game mechanics included on Monopoly cater for quite a few educational uses, the most obvious of them having to do with how to save and spend money in order to invest and that investments in property may not always lead to fiscal success. There are also mechanics related to social play, with players being able to lend money to bail out their friends and prevent them from going bankrupt and leaving the game.

Another obvious use has been in the context of land and lodging development: O'Halloran and Deale [35] designed a version of Monopoly, along with the relevant teaching material, where the objective is to maximize one's asset value by developing hotels and then blocks of hotels. An interesting addition to the usual game mechanics of the original game was that, as the game was played over a semester, players had the opportunity to research the actual real estate value of each property, as well as other emerging information regarding the market, and inform their property development decisions accordingly.

In the context of accounting education, Tanner and Lindquist extended Knechel's [36] idea and used Monopoly as a business simulation for a team-based project for university students. Students would form four-person teams, form a virtual company, agree on a mutual strategy and then face other "companies" in games of 24 turns per player. After the game, the members of each company analyzed the company's transactions as a whole, set up an accounting record and used a general ledger to keep track for each type of transaction: salaries, depreciation expenses, interest expenses and tax expenses. After the evaluation of the game, authors concluded that "students' attitudes towards financial accounting and learning, mutual concern and perceived achievement were very positive at the completion of the project" [37]. Shanklin and Ehlen [38] also worked with the original idea and saw that "the use of an engaging and unusual medium early in the principles course helps students build confidence and provides positive reinforcement of understanding in a course that undergraduate business students do not always enjoy".

Besides including Monopoly in courses where its mechanics make immediate sense, the game has been used in the context of other disciplines as well. Hastunar et al. [39] designed a modified version of the game, referring to food and everyday objects, instead of properties, and to points, instead of money, to teach English to students of 7th grade in Indonesia, while Inal and Cagiltay [40] assessed Monopoly, among other games, with children aged 7 to 9, noting the "clear and immediate feedback of the game" which resulted in increased flow.

An interesting concept, not necessarily restricted to school education, is that of creating Monopoly boards from open data. Gustafsson Friberger defines data games as "as games where gameplay and/or game content is based on real-world data external to the game, and where gameplay supports the exploration of and learning from this data" [41]; in the case of open data games, most of the game content (images, text, Points of Interest, etc.) comes from sources freely available for use, such as a governmental organization, NGO or data aggregator (e.g., Google's Public Data Explorer [42] and the European Union's Open Data Portal [43]). Dissemination of open data is important, since it can provide a substantial basis for argumentation in public speaking or policy making; in the context of education, it strengthens the connection between the concepts and facts taught at school with everyday life, and empowers students to make informed decisions in their life [27]. Friberger and Togelius [44] analyzed thoroughly the different kinds of information which can be used as properties in this context, from geographic data, which is typically readily available and easy to visualize, to demographic, which can be sensitive (in terms of politics). They mention that real-time infrastructure data, such as

flight information, are becoming increasingly available and may be more appealing to avid game players since it helps them relate to the actual providers of the data.

In our work, we wanted to examine whether the implied relations between entities and data contained in the game mechanics of Monopoly would help students identify the same relations between entities from a Big Data set. The subject of European geography was a straightforward choice, because it refers to a variety of numerical and reference data, typically associated with commercial versions of Monopoly. In addition to that, Monopoly entities are grouped using different colors, and ranked with respect to rent prices; we attempted to take advantage of these mechanisms to increase the students' comprehension of the relative size and population of each country and train them to identify those relations in the data. An additional game mechanic has to do with the positioning of the Monopoly entities on the board: even though in the original game there is no reference to any geographic positioning, in Geopoly the four sides of the board correspond to the region of Europe where each country resides. In order to create the required data and populate the board, we developed an automated infrastructure to retrieve data (country names, size and population, and landmarks) from Wikipedia, and create the Geopoly board respecting the grouping and ranking processes described earlier. The same approach can also be used with other Big Data sets, such as plants and animals (used in [27] in the context of a "Top Trumps" card game), where different numerical attributes (e.g., size, weight or life expectancy) or grouping elements (e.g., scientific classification, type of habitat or conservation status) may be used. As a result, we can create different versions of Monopoly to both familiarize students with concepts and relationships in Big Data sets and also follow and examine the learning objectives of the school curriculum, making it easier to integrate such a game in formal education practices.
