We have presented at Virtual Campus Conference 2020 a paper about the integration of SIMVA and FormalZ. The key takeaway of this integration it is that instead of just integrate them by using their own APIs, we follow a different approach by using IMS LTI standard. IMS LTI is usually used to integrate external tools inside a Learning Management System (LMS) like Moodle, Sakai, D2L, Canvas or Blackboard. In our case, we followed this path with a twofold purpose:

• Facilite the integration of different educational tools in SIMVA.  Instead of forcing a third-party to use our own API to perform the integration that could be only useful to work with our tool, we offer the possibility of using IMS LTI for the integration of web based serious games and gamified tools. So this way a third-party interested in using the SIMVA and already be compatible with IMS LTI do need to do nothing and others have the opportunity of choosing the integration using standards and pay off the effort invested.
• Simplify the administrative burden using FormalZ. Although simple, a teacher that want to use FormalZ requires to setup a specific room for each group of students that are going to use the tool. In addition, once a puzzle is created, the teacher has to distribute the join link to the students or at least let them know that there is new puzzle available for them. However, nowadays the LMS are the key means of communication between teachers and students. Moreover, inside a LMS course students and teachers are already enrolled, so the idea was to lower the administrative burden by allowing the teachers of setting up puzzles and allow students to launch the puzzles directly from the LMS.

The presented paper was selected as best paper for the Track 2 of the conference “Quality and Innovation”

You can have a look to the presented paper here.