Interactive Flash Learning Games and Engines

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Interactive Flash Learning Games and Engines

7/18/2006

By Dan Lim, Southern Adventist University

For the last seven years, I’ve been developing games for learning. The development process has been a lot of fun, and I’ve learned three big lessons: students love to learn by playing games almost as much as I enjoy developing them; game structures can be repurposed for different disciplines if the right “hooks” are built into the game platform; and mobile games are the next big thing. Cell phones offer a lot more than text messaging!

Two years ago I moved to Tennessee, where I now serve as the dean of the Virtual Campus and director of Online Learning and Faculty Development for Southern Adventist University, a faith-based private Christian university operated by the Seventh-day Adventist Church. The University is located in Collegedale, Tennessee (seven miles from Chattanooga) and enrolls about 2,500 students, of whom 75% reside in campus housing. I came to the job knowing that to build an online program would require attracting more students to the online environment and encouraging more faculty to prepare courses for this form of delivery. To succeed at both required “systems thinking” – establishing replicable course development processes that would reduce faculty and support staff efforts to build online courses, and engendering a reputation among our online students for teaching content in a challenging, but enjoyable way.

The strategy selected revolved around the work I had begun at the University of Minnesota, Crookston. For what seems like a very long time, we had been working on developing learning games that “addicted” students to learning, while realizing that deep learning required the complex understanding of knowledge that resides within discipline-based faculty, not the game developers. What we did, and what I have continued to do at Southern Adventist University, was to build exciting learning patterns – structures for engagement, reinforcement, and remembering – into a flexible game programming environment. We then identified interested and able faculty to provide the learning content delivered through our gaming engine. By thinking of engaging the student in learning and giving faculty templates and other support systems for developing their content, I have discovered that faculty course development and engaged student learning can be accomplished at the same time. It’s all in the game.

We build the learning objects delivered through our games in Flash because it is nearly universally available or freely downloadable by our users. The vector graphics that underlie Flash mean that the resolution and quality of animation are both excellent and consistent in different computing environments. The Learning Game Generators, within which the Flash game objects are packaged, were built in PHP for Web-based deployment.