Serious gaming supporting competence development in sustainable manufacturing

Becoming a sustainable global manufacturing enterprise is a challenge for almost every manufacturing organization in the world because of its multidimensional nature. Sustainability combines environmental, economic, and social dimensions and is considered to be a complex and hard to learn subject needing a lot of experience and competences. Traditional ways to create such experience and develop competences like role playing and simulations tend to take a lot of time and are expensive. On the other hand, serious gaming has proven to support learners in acquiring new and complex knowledge and is ideally suited to support problem based learning by creating engaging experiences around a contextual problem where users must apply competences to solve these presented challenges. This chapter introduces a new learning environment which is build around a gaming engine supporting the development of competences in specific subject areas. Selected competences in sustainable global manufacturing lead to the definition of scenarios, which then can be executed by a game engine, thus creating experience within the user. A knowledge ecology space allows the user to interact and reflect on learning outcomes with other participants. The subject of sustainable global manufacturing is the application case presented in this chapter showing how specific competences in this area have been identified and how a game scenario has been developed. Finally, its implementation and evaluation is discussed

DEVELOPMENT OF COMPETENCE FOR SUSTAINABLE MANUFACTURING BY USING SERIOUS GAMES

This paper will present preliminary results of the EU-funded FP7 integrated project TARGET. The main aim of the project is to develop a novel technology-enhanced learning platform that provides learners with a responsive environment that addresses the rapid, personalized competence development and the sharing of experiences associated with introducing sustainability into a manufacturing enterprise. The main objectives of the paper are to deduce specialized sustainability-related competences for managers and to convert them into a virtual game scenario. Besides the research approach of deriving the competences, critical incidents in the game will be presented. The findings and potential application will be demonstrated in a case based on Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)

University Action Lab : challenge teaching toolkit

UniverCity Action Lab Challenge Teaching Toolkit provides guidance for university lecturers and study programme managers to implement a hands-on, real-life, and problem-based course module in cooperation with city stakeholders: public authorities, relevant societal representatives, or industry partners. The Toolkit was developed as an intellectual output (IO3) within the framework of the UniverCity Action Lab project, co-funded by the Erasmus+ programme. This is a living document that can be continuously updated with experience from practice as UCityLab courses (City Challenge Programmes) will be piloted at four project partner universities

Using behavioral indicators to assess competences in a sustainable manufacturing learning scenario

This paper introduces a learning scenario created for a serious game to develop competences in the domain of sustainable manufacturing, by applying a Lifecycle Assessment (LCA). A set of behavioural indicators is introduced to assess how particular competences do change while the player is engaging in playing the game scenario. It furthermore presents early evaluation results of the game scenario on a sample of master grade students at the University of Bremen

Contextually enriched competence model in the field of sustainable manufacturing for simulation style technology enhanced learning environments

In order to remain competitive, engineers need to acquire competences necessary to attain the sustainability objectives that are emerging in the manufacturing industry. The training of current and future engineers needs to achieve two criteria: the learners need to be able to apply the learning into complex, life-like situations and the learning outcomes need to be achieved rapidly. Competence-based and technology-enhanced learning (TEL) in general and serious games and simulations in particular have recently attracted a great deal of attention as they have the potential to deliver on both accounts. Designing learning content for simulation style competence-based TEL environments places special demands on competence modelling. Competences are traditionally defined and modelled using internal-to-individual factors such as knowledge, skills and attitudes. However, designing simulation style competence-based TEL environments, such as serious games, cannot be based solely on these factors. In work situations competences are performed neither in solitude nor isolation. Contextual factors such as organization processes, laws and norms, the market and available technologies significantly influence competence performance. As the simulations in question need to be life-like constructions ofwork situations the role of contextual factors is heightened. In addition, the content area of sustainable manufacturing is novel, which adds to the challenge. The two main innovative contributions that are presented in this paper are: (1) an enhanced competence modelling methodology which aids in identifying and structuring relevant contextual factors that have an impact on the performance of the competences in question, and (2) the output of applying this methodology, i.e. a contextually enriched competence model in the field of sustainable manufacturing that can be used to facilitate the design of the TEL content for serious games and simulations. The work presented in the paper is a part of the European Seventh Framework Programme Integrated Project TARGET, the main aim of which is to develop a new genre of TEL environments that can be effectively used in engineering education to support future engineersʼ rapid competence development in the field of sustainable manufacturing

Mission, objectives and activities of the Slovene university career centres

Three main Slovene Universities (University of Ljubljana, University of Primorska and University of Maribor) have established and developed a joint consortium of University career centres. The unified system of university career centres enables the effective transfer of information, the exchange of knowledge, competences and best practices. The article presents briefly the consortium which was established by the three universities in the field of lifelong career guidance. It describes the proposal of consortium for a joint concept of university career centres and, in more detail, one of the tools the centres plan