Work in progress - learning through role play games

Abstract

It is commonly accepted that the educational environment has been undergoing considerable change due to the use of the Information and Communication tools. But learning depends upon actions such as experimenting, visualizing and demonstrating through which the learner succeeds in constructing his own knowledge. Although it is not easy to achieve these actions through current ICT supported learning approaches, Role Playing Games (RPG) may well develop such capacities. The creation of an interactive computer game with RPG characteristics, about the 500th anniversary of the city of Funchal, the capital of Madeira Island, is invested with compelling educational/pedagogical implications, aiming clearly at teaching history and social relations through playing. Players interpret different characters in different settings/scenarios, experiencing adventures, meeting challenges and trying to reach multiple and simultaneous goals in the areas of education, entertainment and social integration along the first 150 years of the history of Funchal. Through this process they will live and understand all the social and historical factors of that epoch.

Skill and Competence Development Through Games

“…Computer games have different types or genre, can be played on a standalone or networked form, in a synchronous or asynchronous format [17]. Playing a computer game generates a series of events that outline a narrative and carry emotions, pleasures and challenges unique to that narrative.…”

“…Failure to follow these rules constitutes a crime or mistake and implies a punishment or penalty [16].…”

Learning programming with serious games

“…Games can be social environments, sometimes involving large distributed communities. They imply self-learning abilities (players are often required to seek out information to master the game itself), allow transfer of learning from other realities, and are inherently experiential with the engagement of multiple senses [30].…”

Sustainability of open educational resources: The eCity case

“…The project assumed that this was not due to lesser skills of these youngsters but mostly due to wrong teaching strategies. Students belong to the "net-generation" and they are "digital natives": they are technologically-savvy, they quickly absorb information but in shorter chunks, they expect instant responses and feedback and they want to be active in their learning [8]. Games have been demonstrated to be particularly fit for experiential learning and to support competence development for engineering [9][10] so there was a clear fit to the project objectives.…”