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Features
Interactive Flash Learning Games and Engines
7/18/2006
We are using Visual Studio.NET as we begin to migrate our gaming environment to mobile delivery environments. We’re starting with very small programs that can be downloaded to a PDA, and are keeping an eye on cell phones for content delivery as they become a standard part of our students’ lives. Also, faculty in their mobile environment can develop the game contents. Just as students work and learn in the crevices of their busy schedules, faculty work and develop in tiny windows of engagement. Content creation and delivery are both implemented for on-the-go access.We’re in our second generation of developing the game engine and in this round we’re developing initially for the sciences – biology, chemistry, and physics. Our earlier work, created in the first generation engine, served various disciplines (more than 150 games now) from the social sciences to agriculture. A spin-off game implementation we’re especially proud of provides insights into the Bible. This game site recently was awarded the Grand Prize Winner in Game Programming by Guide Magazine.
We feel the following are important principles to follow for game design:
- Build simple, intuitive, and elegant game interfaces that engage but don’t require time to learn. Why should a student learn how to use an interface when they can use their time learning content?
- Randomize content delivery in a meaningful, but not overly predictable, set of patterns. Routine is boring and turns off students.
- Introduce compelling learning twists into the games and balance the levels of difficulty. As Vygotsky taught us many years ago, there is an optimal level of difficulty – not too hard and not too easy – that engages learners and leads them toward mastery.
- Take advantage of your content experts. Many have long practiced content delivery and sequencing in their lectures. Games can offer a different modality for them to employ their well-honed teaching strategies.
- Value and measure repeat visits by students. If they keep coming back, you have an unobtrusive measure of the value of your game. Correlate the usage data with learning outcomes to answer the skeptics who don’t feel that learning can be fun.
So how has this worked at Southern Adventist University? We are launching 12 brand new online courses in the newly created Virtual Campus in the Fall and Winter semesters. We now have 10 faculty teaching in the Virtual Campus program, compared to none just one year ago. All Virtual Campus online courses will have some learning contents presented in the Flash learning games. We deliver gaming contents in nine disciplines and have noticed that even five of our traditional on-campus classes are using games in at least a limited sense.
There is, of course, more to do and we have some unmet challenges. We’ve worked the bugs out of the authoring environment, but will need to strive to keep the SWF files small for good network response time as we move into more graphic intensive games. And the mobile environment – the environment in which we think much learning should occur – is not as well standardized as the desktop. Mobile Flash is promising, but less ubiquitous on PDAs and cell phones.
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