Developing Serious Games for Learning and Assessment

Serious games can change the traditional "drill and kill" educational system by creating learner centered, "what if", virtual environments. The learner feels much more in control, and actually enjoys interacting in these environments.

The following process can be efficiently used for designing and implementing effective serious games:

The first port in this journey should be to identify the pedagogical goals. In other words, identify the audience, and determine what is it that you want to teach them. The 'learning objectives' should ideally be based on the verbs identified by Anderson and Krathwohl (2001). You can learn more about this at http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/bloomtax.htm

This step draws heavily on the resources of the learning field. Ideally, either your in-house training expert would work on this, or else, you would take advantage of consultancy from a learning expert.

The second step involve the creation of the game itself. To ensure that the game supports the learning goal, the story behind it needs to be worked out well. Generally, most stories should have two core paths, one that leads to the outcome when the expected competency is not demonstrated, and a second that occurs when the required competency is adequately demonstrated. This is a good time to identify the major plot events that should take place down both paths.

Generally, the space between major plot events can be considered to be a stand-alone 'game level'. The space between the plot points can be filled with what we would consider to be the actual game (interactivity). The game design involves identifying the environment, the objects within the environment that may change state, rules governing how the changes in state takes place in response to a player's actions and the feedback that is given to the player in response to the player when changes in state take place within the game.

The player can be provided feedback, and their actions can be assessed based on the changes that take place within the game. In the next post, I'll bring the microscope down on the these two elements, which are of enduring interest to me.

References:

ANDERSON, L W, & KRATHWOHL D R (eds.) (2001). A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. New York: Longman