The "Water Cooler" game

Much has been written about the theoretical potential of digital games to transform teaching and learning and to offer new forms of digital assessment; yet the education system in the United Kingdom (UK) is arguably still focused exclusively on the assessment and reward of individual effort and achievement. This can be at odds with the requirements of twenty-first century working environments and in the requirements for developing the personal employability characteristics of students. Engaging students in authentic collaborative project work that requires sophisticated and coordinated communication can present real challenges. Employers are demanding, as prerequisite, that graduates have highly developed communication and collaborative team working skills for opportunities in the digital industries such as Games Design, however Games Design students are often quite isolated in their personal industry related practice, working methods and their online lifestyles and lack the “soft skills” which would enable them to work successfully within a team. In this paper, the authors elaborate on how Hull School of Art and Design has attempted to address this problem through the implementation of an Applied Game, the “Watercooler Game”, for their Games Industry undergraduates. They present their reflections on the rationale behind the pedagogic approach, the decision to develop an applied game to address their pedagogic challenges and their experience of working with a commercial Games Developer in producing the game. The authors present the initial findings of their evaluation of game from a multidimensional perspective. The pedagogic approach (using applied games with a selected small cohort of students), the technical approach adopted by the developers of the game (an open source asset based approach) and the pedagogic efficacy of the game through evaluation of the learning objectives achieved by a cohort of seventy learners situated in the College’s School of Art and Design

Towards Mapping Competencies through Learning Analytics: Real-time Competency Assessment for Career Direction through Interactive Simulation

Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 201, pp. 1-13

Brief history of serious games

Serious Games are now an established field of study. In this field most would attribute the rise of Serious Games to Clark C Abt’s creation of the term in 1970, or indeed Ben Sawyer’s popularization of it in 2002. However, considering the rich history of purposing non-digital games, itself preceded by discussions of purposing play that are traceable to the work of Plato, it can be said that Serious Games is a contemporary manifestation of centuries old theories and practices. In this chapter, we explore the pre-history of Serious Games, beginning with the suggested purpose, and purposing of play. Throughout this historical review we identify key in research and practice that are apparent in the contemporary Serious Games field

Formal Concept Analysis for Modelling Students in a Technology-enhanced Learning Setting

Abstract. We suggest the Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) as theoretical backbone in technology-enhanced learning settings to support a students´ learning process in two ways: i) by engaging with concept lattices, the structure of the knowledge domain and the interrelations of its concepts become explicit, and ii) by providing visual feedback in form of open learner modelling, the student´s reflection on the own strengths and weaknesses is facilitated. For teachers, the FCA provides intuitive visualizations for a set of pedagogically relevant questions, concerning the performance of students on the individual-as well as on the class-level

Masters in Serious Games Curriculum Framework

Thin, A. G., Lim, T., Louchart, S., De Gloria, A., Mayer, I., Kickmeier-Rust, M., Klamma, R., VeltKamp, R., Arnab, S., Bellotti, F., Boyle, L., Prada, R., Westera, W., Nadolski, R., & Abbas Petersen, S. (2013). Masters in Serious Games Curriculum Framework. Deliverable 5.3 of the Games and Learning Alliance Network of Excellence. Available at http://www.seriousgamessociety.org/download/SGMastersFwk.pdf.This report outlines a European Masters of Science programme on serious gaming.This report is a deliverable of the GALA project, which is sponsored by the the FP7 Programme of the European Commissio

D10.2 – Research Data Management Plan, version 3.0:RAGE – WP10 – D10.2

What data will be collected, processed or generated during the RAGE project? Following what methodology and standards? And what data will be shared and/or made openly available, and how will it be curated and preserved? These issues are typically described in a Data Management Plan (DMP), outlining how research data is handled during the project and after the project is completed. The RAGE DMP specifically provides guidelines on ethics, data protection and open research data access to RAGE researchers involved in WP5 (Case experiments) and WP8 (Validation). Ethics and data protection are especially relevant in view of the games and audiences targeted by RAGE. Therefore, RAGE is one of the participating projects in the EU open research data pilot, an initiative under Horizon 2020 that aims at improving and maximising the access to and re-use of research data created in European projects.This document is the third and final iteration of the DMP