Leemkuil
Henny Leemkuil
Faculty of Behavioural Science
Department of Instructional technology
University of Twente
h.h.leemkuil@utwente.nl
How to adapt game features for instructional purposes?
Games, simulations, and case studies have an important role in education and training in putting learning into a context. Furthermore, they are constructivistic environments in which students are invited to actively solve problems (Jacques, 1995). Games have played a role in instructional situations for quite some time. Much of the work on the evaluation of games however, has been anecdotal, descriptive or judgmental, but there are some indications that they are effective in producing knowledge gains because of their interactive and multimedia capabilities, and their abilities to keep students deeply immersed and engaged for sustained periods of time.
One of its difficulties is that students often fail to have conscious awareness of the concepts, structures, and algorithms they encounter and use in educational computer games, and fail to be able to transfer what they have learned to other contexts. This could be due to the fact that students, while playing games, mainly use an unselective mode (u-mode) of learning. U-mode learning is probable in situations in which there is much information in the learning environment and the key variables and their interrelationships are not salient. Opposed to the unselective mode of learning is explicit, selective learning (that is effortful and reportable).
The fact that students often fail to have conscious awareness of the concepts, structures, and algorithms they encounter and use in educational computer games although they are active, involved and motivated, can be (and should be) addressed by careful game design and by integration of game play with other types of learning. There is general consensus that learning with interactive environments such as games, simulations, and adventures is not effective when no instructional measures or support are added. Students must be guided, prompted, motivated, and sometimes forced to learn from experiences. Instructional supports include the following elements that are listed by Alessi: explaining or demonstrating the phenomenon or procedure; giving hints and prompts before student actions; giving feedback following student actions; providing a coach, advice, or help system; providing dictionaries and glossaries; providing user controls not needed in a non-instructional simulation; and giving summary feedback or a debriefing.
In this paper results will be reported form an experiment, in which different versions of KM Quest, a collaborative internet-based simulation game to teach knowledge management, were compared on their instructional effectiveness. The instructional measures that are implemented focus on supporting players in the unselective mode of learning. It is hypothesized that the implementation of measures that support learners in directing there attention on important elements in the environment and in constructing meaning based on experiences they have in a simulation game will be effective in making implicit knowledge more explicit and therefore more suitable for recall and transfer.
Information about the author.
Henny Leemkuil is Staff member of the Department of Instructional Technology at the Faculty of Behavioural Sciences of the University of Twente in Enschede. He teaches courses in Applied Communication Technology and is doing research on instructional measures to support learning in simulations and games.
|
Sitemap 