Contextual Teaching and Learning Using a Card Game Interface

Abstract

With bases well established in the constructivism of Vygotsky, Piaget and Dewey, Contextual Teaching and Learning is about to help students not only to memorize contents but also to construct the relation between subjects in order to define their meaning. Contextual Teaching and Learning represents an important field of study and analysis that can be widely applied to classrooms and new media but lack of information and research, especially in Video and virtual technologies. This paper proposes a Card Game based User Interface that reduces the players learning curve of the gameplay and help the game content to be assimilated during the player’s progress. Such interface can be applied to educational and non-educational Video always providing context, i.e. meaningful content, trough text cards design. For research purposes, a contextual card deck based on Art History was developed and tested against the same theme of traditional game interface with buttons derived from Massively Multiplayer Online abilities. The provided results shows that Card as Video Games interface can help to simplify interaction while giving the player subjective information and content. By playing a prototype with the proposed interfaces, users were presented with questions about Art History, which answers were in the game’s interface. User and community driven design method was used in the prototype development. As Virtual Contextual Teaching and Learning is a concept yet to be well explored and defined, the present research aims to contribute with the notion of humans cognition development in simulated environments.