Developing Professional “Game Teacher” Repertoires: Describing Participants and Measuring Effects in a Danish College Course on Game Based Learning

The first Danish Game-Based Learning course offered by a teachers college enrolled 42 students with a variety of backgrounds and interests in games. We characterize the students who enrolled in the course in terms of gaming literacies and preferences, and gauge the impact of the course in terms of building actionable skill sets. Following Schön (1986) we use these data to frame students’ transition from gamers or game curious teachers to developing professional repertoires.Interviews and statistical comparison to other students indicate that while student’s existing preferences for the “heavier” game motifs arousal and fantasy (Sherry et al 2006) significantly predicted their attitudes to learning though games, active experiences from the course came to determine their fledgling professional repertoires as measured though their own projections of what they will use games for in their professional careers. We expand and explain these findings using embedded mixed methods analysis, and conclude that games are a good practical case for training various teaching
competences, but that building flexible professional repertoires requires more varied experiences than a single course can muster.