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The Efficacy of Simulated Project Environments in Improving Student Outcomes on Multi-Disciplinary Project Assignments Martin Lynagh, Lecturer, Division of Arts and Games, Abertay University Email: m.lynagh@abertay.ac.uk Overview
Research Questions
Much of our teaching in SDI is centred on a project-based pedagogy where students’ performance is assessed on the work they produce as part of a multidisciplinary project team tasked with producing a piece of interactive media.
Academic and game designer Ian Bogost’s concept of Procedural Rhetoric holds that rule-based interactions, whether these take the form of applied or commercial games, can be used to effectively persuade, and educate (Bogost, 2010). My research attempts to harness this property of interactive media through the design, implementation, and testing of a serious game which encapsulates the experience of colleagues from faculty and industry practitioners. The two main questions it endeavours to answer are: - What is the efficacy of a Game Production RPG in improving project outcomes and student’s attainment?
The application of this approach in formal educational settings can be traced at least as far back as the architectural ‘competizione’ of 16th Century Italy, which were the result of architects’ efforts to professionalise their practice (Knoll, 1997). This is echoed in our own attempts as educators to professionalise game development in the modern day (Harvey and Shepherd, 2017; Weststar, 2015). There are two problems inherent in this approach, as implemented currently in Higher Education: 1. Planning for and performing well on such projects requires a degree of tacit knowledge that is often assumed in a professional environment. This type of knowledge is accrued over time based on experience resulting from real-world pressures that are hard to simulate in this format. 2. The short timescales that student projects are necessarily constrained to do not provide an adequate simulation of professional practice. In industry projects often take years to deliver rather than a single fifteen-week academic term. To help find solutions to these two issues I am investigating the efficacy of a simulated project environment, in the form of a Game Production Role Playing Game (GPRPG), in improving outcomes for student development teams. I also propose investigating the efficacy of different implementation styles backed by the same underlying rule system and content.
Methodology (cont.) This figure illustrates the basic gameloop envisaged:
- How does this efficacy very between implementation styles? Specifically, how does the efficacy of more social styles, associated with tabletop RPGs, differ from stand alone digital products?
Methodology Literature Review: A survey of the literature dealing with the use, design and assessment of serious games in education. Survey: Module staff at Abertay, game industry clients who have worked with student teams on our third-year professional project module (DES310) and students them selves will be interviewed to discover the themes and issues which most commonly affect student project outcomes. The results will be subject to qualitative analysis and the resulting list of issues will be fed into the design of the game itself. Implementation: The game will initially be implemented as a TTRPG (Tabletop Role Playing Game) with digital elements. This will involve creation of an analogue game board with pieces and event cards. Rule resolution will take place at the end of each turn and will be assisted by digital means. It will later be implemented as a standalone digital game.
The efficacy of the game will be evaluated by comparing the performance of student teams participating in our Professional Projects module selected to play the game at the start of term against that of a control group. Both groups performance will be analysed using both quantitative and qualitative methods as part of a convergent parallel mixed methods design (Cresswell, 2014). This process will consist of interviews, surveys, and comparisons against predicted grades.
References Bogost, I. (2010) Persuasive games: The expressive power of videogames. Mit Press. Cresswell, J. (2014) Research design. Sage publications Thousand Oaks. Harvey, A. and Shepherd, T. (2017) 'When passion isn’t enough: gender, affect and credibility in digital games design', International Journal of Cultural Studies, 20(5), pp. 492-508. Knoll, M. (1997) 'The project method: Its vocational education origin and international development', JITE Journal of Industrial Teacher Education. Weststar, J. (2015) 'Understanding video game developers as an occupational community', Information, communication & society, 18(10), pp. 1238-1252.
Abertay University is an operating name of the University of Abertay Dundee, a charity registered in Scotland, No: SC016040.