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At the University of Hamburg, integrating new media into educational settings is a central aspect of teacher education. The introduction of Serious Game programming to teacher education supports pre-service teachers as they familiarise themselves with creative ways of utilising the educational potential of new media, for themselves as well as their students.
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eLearning Papers • ISSN: 1887-1542 • www.elearningpapers.eu
n.º 30 • September 2012
1
From the field
Pre-service Teacher Education, Serious Games
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Silke Günther, Fakultät für Erziehungswissenschaft, Psychologie und BewegungswissenschaftUniversität [email protected]
Introducing Serious Game Programming to Teacher Education at Hamburg University
At the University of Hamburg, integrating new media into educational settings is a cen-tral aspect of teacher education. The introduction of Serious Game programming to teacher education supports pre-service teachers as they familiarise themselves with creative ways of utilising the educational potential of new media, for themselves as well as their students.
Hamburg University, one of the largest universities in Germany, accepts about 900 pre-ser-vice teachers per year. During their course of studies, they can choose to focus on courses in educational science aimed at deepening their knowledge about integrating new media into educational settings.
In this article, we describe a course for pre-service teachers designed to get them into touch with creating games for educational purposes while offering them various possibilities of having experiences with the benefits and the possible pitfalls of new media usage in educa-tion in general.
In the second half of 2011, twenty-seven students attended the course as a part of their regu-lar coursework required for a master’s degree in teaching. Most of these students had never programmed before and were introduced to programming by using the iconic programming tools Alice 2.0 and Scratch. Three participants had been taught at school how to program in Delphi and were encouraged to make use of their skills. The central task of the course was to create a Serious Game that should either relate to the students’ subjects or to a pedagogical field they had already worked in, e.g. youth work. The game was to be supplemented by the structure for a lesson or an activity based on the educational possibilities of the game. A pre-requisite for conducting the course was the availability of a mobile notebook center, about one third of the students used their own notebooks.
Mostly working in groups, the students familiarized themselves with the programming tools after drawing pictures of what the final ten games should look like. In addition, they were introduced to the ideas behind using Serious Games in educational settings (Gee, 2007) as well as basic concepts for developing and evaluating software in general, e.g. usability and playability (Genvo 2008). While programming their games, the students came across a num-ber of problems (Jenkins, 2002), which can be sorted into three major categories.
Some obstacles came up, when the students tried to grasp basic programming concepts like loops or if instructions. To solve these problems, the students required little assistance and usually used a try-and-error approach, which was supported by the possibility of getting im-mediate feedback by playing the current version of the respective game. A lot of students were successful in grasping more advanced concepts like the usage of variables. A second kind of problems involved integrating visuals and audio into the games. Some students were not familiar with image editing freeware like GIMP or had never used free recording software
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Papers30www.elearningp
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eLearning Papers • ISSN: 1887-1542 • www.elearningpapers.eu
n.º 30 • September 2012
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From the field
like Audacity. Thus, the course contributed to increasing their familiarity with software they can rely on when working on new media projects with their future students.
Another difficulty was the didactic design of the games. The students had to make a lot of choices not only typical of design-ing games for learning, but also reflecting the difficulties of de-signing analogue learning material, e.g. worksheets. The games
Figure 1: Hidden-Object Game for learning basic French – example of verbal motivation
needed a visual structure and it was necessary to define how to present information, e.g. answer clues, to the learner. Besides, the level of difficulty had to be adjusted to the intended play-ers and motivating the players became important. After testing their games with the intended gamers twice, the students could adjust their programs and handed in their final versions at the end of the semester.
Figure 1 shows a hidden-object game created to motivate junior students to acquire and practice an understanding of basic French. The game was pro-grammed in Alice 2.0. and embeds the search for hidden objects in a crime story, mainly told in French.
The math game shown in Figure 2 main-ly relies on motivating by giving visual feedback. After choosing a number range, the players get to solve a num-ber of randomly created equations. The game was programmed in Delphi.
The course was an initial attempt at in-troducing Serious Game programming to teacher education at Hamburg Uni-versity. The results showed that pro-gramming Serious Games offers a lot of possibility for supporting pre-service teachers in acquiring the skills neces-
sary for integrating new media in educational set-tings.
Figure 2: Game for training basic arithmetic operations within variable number ranges – example of visual motivation
eLearning
Papers30www.elearningp
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eLearning Papers • ISSN: 1887-1542 • www.elearningpapers.eu
n.º 30 • September 2012
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From the field
ReferencesGee, J. P. (2007). What Video Games Have to Teach Us about
Learning and Literacy, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Genvo, S. (2008). Understanding Digital Playability. In Perron, B.
& Wolf, M.J. (Eds.): The Video Game Theory Reader 2, New York:
Routledge, 133-149.
Jenkins, T. (2002). On the Difficulty of Learning to Program,
retrieved August 10, 2012 from http://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/~steve/
localed/jenkins.html.
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