Together with secondary school students we investigate how concepts from the field of game-based learning can be used to develop learning methods and materials covering the topic informatics and society.
Project Homepage: http://www.piglab.org/sparklinggames
Team: Fares Kayali, Peter Purgathofer
Project Partners (Scientific): Gerit Götzenbrucker und Vera Schwarz (Universität Wien)
Starting with a detailed analysis of existing learning and mainstream commercial games, students step by step conceptualise and develop games and game-like materials to support teaching areas including copyright and intellectual property, privacy, surveillance, social media, and big data. The project leads to a transfer of academic skills to students, who gain expertise in the areas of game design and serious games as well as in social science research methods intended to assess and reflect on their creations.
Key results of the project include a commented collection of existing games supporting learning about informatics and society, new games and game concepts developed by students, and bottom-up insights into how game-based learning can be used in schools. Sparkling Games strives to expand the potential of games as media for learning, reflection and for teaching media literacy. We further hypothesise that the process of creating learning games itself constitutes a highly valuable learning experience.