The Blue Frog Meets Facebook:

• In Event: SET Learning

Abstract

How can educators utilize emerging social media and other internet technologies to develop effective instructional games? In this paper, the authors posit that educators should maximize the entertainment value of the games by relying on the pillars of social presence and emotional contagion.

Social presence, as a field of study, originated with the development of AT&T’s video calling technology half a century ago. Although emotionality has likewise been studied for decades, the principle of emotional contagion has only recently been applied to social media technologies, with explosive debate resulting from a controversial Facebook study regarding mood manipulation.

Nevertheless, the authors of this paper hypothesize that the principle of emotional contagion can be relied upon, in tandem with the principle of social presence, to develop more entertaining and thus more effective educational games. They propose to test their hypotheses by applying these principles to a web based educational game entitled Save The Blue Frog (available at SaveTheBlueFrog.com), a game that relies upon a role-playing simulation case to educate its participants.

Authors

• Michael L Kraten, Providence College

• Stephen Kozlowski, Eastern Illinois University