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2008; Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges; Volume: 24; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

1937-4771

Nigel Oldham, Frank Ackerman,

Educational Games and Gamification

Truly engaging 14 to 20 year old students of the Millennium Generation requires more attention to motivation and context than has here-to-for been necessary. This generation has grown up immersed in high-fidelity visual and aural environments, both simulated and real, and through the use of the Web also expects a high degree of interactivity in these environments. A new art form which combines all of these elements is computer gaming, which every year captures a growing share of the entertainment market and audience attention, especially in the age group we are considering. The question naturally arises then, can educators take advantage not only of the intrinsic fascination these games have for their audiences, but can they turn the commercial products themselves into effective mediums for teaching? This is precisely what the work described in this paper has done with resounding success. In 2004 a team of four computer scientists at West Nottinghamshire College embarked on a mission of turning a highly successful commercial game from Bioware Corporation, Neverwinter Nights, into a teaching tool that not only captured the total attention of their students, but also increased pass rates on it's targeted national certification examinations three-fold!