On the importance of objectives for game, learning and activities design
“A key challenge when designing a game for e-learning is ensuring that the goals within the game support to the learning objectives and not detract from them.” (Whitton, 2010, P.90)
The importance of a well defined 'learning goal' in the design process became painfully apparent during the third and fourth week of the course. Somewhere during the activity of designing a Learning game using Google Earth group 2 focused more on the interactions (activities) then achieving the learning goal. The reason: a learning goal was not defined.
I think the main reason behind this was the reversal of the design process: instead of asking - “Can a game help me deliver content (or concept) X?“ the question leading the group was: “Design a game with a learning goal”. The time scale made the problem worse – instead of designing a coherent game with a story threading through it the group focused on specific gaming like activities.
Gee claims that “Good game designers are practical theoreticians of learning” (Gee, 2004) – especially if the reverse is true one would not go about designing a lesson without having defined the learning objectives first.
Scot Lake from the BrandonHall discusses the difficulty of introducing the 'game' idea into the workplace and instead suggests the gamification of specific experiences: as an example he provides loyalty cards – the idea of getting 'points' for specific Activities (in this case shopping with a specific store) is then used to encourage us to do more of that activity (and of course there are also 'prizes').
The idea of using commercial-off-the-shelf games has been discussed in different publications (Gee, Whitton, Malone etc) but, while existing off-the-shelf games can be included in day-to-day learning (in schools or universities) the same cannot be said of the workplace (with a few specific exceptions). Regardless of the scope of the planning (single activity or a complete game) it is hard to ignore the Importance of object definition.
References
Lake, Scot “Gaming Mechanics” http://brandon-hall.com/blogs/learning/ Accessed: 25/1/2012
Whitton, Nicola. 2010, “Learning with digital games”, Routledge, New York
Gee James Paul, 2004, “Learning by Design: Good Video Games as Learning Machines”, available at: http://www.academiccolab.org/resources/documents/Game%20Paper.pdf