Game Design Skills Research Articles

Educational games created by medical students in a cultural safety training game jam: a qualitative descriptive study

BackgroundCultural safety training, whereby health professionals learn to reflect on their own culture and to respect the cultural identity of patients, could address intercultural tensions in health care. Given the context of their medical education, however, medical students might perceive such training to be dull or even unnecessary. Game jams, collaborative workshops to create and play games, are a potentially engaging learning environment for medical students today. How medical students learn while making games is poorly documented. This study describes the characteristics of educational games created by participants in a cultural safety game jam and the concepts they used to create games.MethodsAs part of a trial, 268 Colombian medical students divided into 48 groups participated in an eight-hour game jam to create a prototype of an educational game on cultural safety. In this qualitative descriptive study, we reviewed the description of the games uploaded by participants, including the name, objective, game narrative, rules, rewards, penalties, and pictures. An inductive thematic analysis collated their descriptions.ResultsThe game descriptions illustrated the characteristics of the educational games and the aspects of the cultural safety concept that the students used to create games. Medical students situated cultural safety within a continuum with culturally unsafe actions at one end and cultural safety at the other end. Although not familiar with game design, the students designed prototypes of basic educational games including game dynamics, game scenarios, learning objectives, and pedagogical strategies.ConclusionThe findings of this study could help researchers and educators to understand how medical students learn from game design and the kind of games that game jam participants can create without previous game design skills.

Voxel generation. Raising awareness for informatics and society among high-school pupils through a game-design project

Our research project was aimed at teaching high-school pupils game design skills and raising their awareness for the subject area “informatics and society.” A project-based-teaching approach enabled us to incorporate social learning by having teams of pupils work on informatics-and-society topics and subsequently design their own games. The focus of this article is an online survey conducted twice, at the beginning and end of the pupils’ project participation, showing if and how the participants’ attitudes towards and awareness of informatics and society changed during this school year. We discuss the most important survey results, also in relation to studies on internet use of adolescents in the German-speaking countries. Additionally, an evaluation group discussion with the involved teachers provides expert validity. We found that our project-based and social-learning approach was successful in raising awareness for informatics and society as well as in teaching game design.

Developing kindergarten students’ game design skills by teaching game design through organized game design interventions

Developing students’ game design skills and the process of teaching game design acquire increasing research interest. The aim of this study was to (a) examine the impact of game design teaching interventions to kindergarten students and (b) examine the design of such interventions for teaching game design to students of this age. In that regard, this paper presents a teaching experiment, conducted with students in the early childhood. The experiment followed a quasi-experimental design, with a pre-test and a post-test and a focus and control groups. For a period of three months, only the focus group was presented with participatory game design activities while the control group followed the standard curriculum. During those interventions, students of the focus group worked on designing educational games about teaching pre-algebraic patterning to their peers. A mixed methods analysis was applied to analyze the results, which suggest that the facilitation of participatory game design activities has a positive impact on the development of game design skills. Additionally, this paper elaborates on issues that emerged through the study related to collaborative and individual work of students, difficulties in focusing on designing educational games and diversity of game proposals.

Connecting game design with problem posing skills in early childhood

AbstractThis paper presents a teaching experiment with preschoolers, considering games as means for presenting problem‐based situations and focusing on the development of game design in connection to problem posing skills. The study was conducted in a focus group of eighteen 5–6‐year‐old students who participated in game design sessions, compared to a control group of students of the same age, who did not participate in any game design interventions. An experimental design research methodology was applied, where their skills, both in game design and in problem posing, were examined by a pretest and posttest. The findings suggest that the development of game design skills with the support of appropriate organized teaching interventions can also have a positive impact on the development of problem posing skills.

Evaluation of Mathematical Game Design Skills of Pre-Service Classroom Teachers

The purpose of the research is to evaluate the games prepared by pre-service classroom teachers within the scope of “Mathematics Teaching 1” and “Mathematics Teaching 2” courses, which are included in the undergraduate classroom teaching programs in Turkey, and to make predictions on the game design skills of pre-service teachers through them. The study has been conducted as a case study which is one of the qualitative research designs. The sampling group has been composed of 108 mathematical games designed by 386 undergraduate students, who were third year students at Necmettin Erbakan University, department of classroom teaching in 2015-2016 academic year, fall and spring semesters. Data collected through interviews and observations have been analysed with the help of descriptive analysis method. Results indicate that pre-service teachers failed at designing games that are satisfactory in terms of “Game Rules”, “Goals and objectives”, “Outcomes and feedback” and “Interaction”. This can be taken as one of the main indicators of general failure in game designs. According to the other findings, game designs developed by pre-service teachers were partially or completely satisfactory in terms of “Conflict (Competition, challenge, opposition)” and “Story”. Keywords: Mathematics education, pre-service classroom teachers, game design

게임 구성요소를 중심으로 한 게임 분석 방법에 대한 고찰

The game industry has been seeing rapid change brought on by the competitive environment globally. As a result, game design skill is being magnified as a key to success. Because of lack of game design skills, Korean game market is in crisis recently. The game analysis is necessary to enhance game design skills. However, criteria and definition of game analysis is not clear and it is difficult to use for game development. This paper will suggest H-G model which has two factors that are 'human role' and 'the scope of game analysis'. This model segments 9 types of game analysis method. This study finds the limitation of leading researches and tries to improve it mapping the major leading researches to H-G model. This paper would help to make the game analysis be integrated and systemic research as regards 9 types of H-G model.

A Model Driven Development Framework for Serious Games

Serious games have become more important in the field of education. The tight connection of education to computer game playing by presenting learning content in a game-like environment creates a better usage experience thus leading to higher usage and potentially better learning outcomes. To create successful serious games, it is necessary to combine programming knowledge and didactical knowledge to properly include learning objectives. Most educators are not able to develop such games on their own due to lack of programming and game design skills. In my dissertation, I am focusing on a solution based on model driven development techniques that shall allow educators to create didactically sound serious games. My idea is it to provide a domain specific modeling language for serious games and a visual modeling tool, which allows the generation of games from visual models.

Using Gamestar Mechanic Within a Nodal Learning Ecology to Learn Systems Thinking: A Worked Example

This “worked example” is taken from a game design research study conducted in the spring of 2008 using Gamestar Mechanic, an online game intended to help middle and high school students develop basic game design skills. Game design and systems thinking skills, in this study conceptualized as dialogic in nature, were regarded as having the potential to guide learners to understand the dynamic complexity of systems of various types. The overall study focused on testing the viability of Gamestar Mechanic and the learning ecology it instantiated to improve participants' systems thinking skills. A principal research question that guided the study was: Does a learning ecology generated and mediated by the game design software Gamestar Mechanic improve participants' ability to engage in systems thinking? A second question concerned the question of how: How did participants come to develop systems thinking skills? The worked example is made up of a set of artifacts created by one participant, Tania. The artifacts...