Purposive Game Development to foster Technical and Management Skills: A Longitudinal Study

In order to establish new and motivating learning environments, we have developed the “Purposive Game Production” concept. Our students at the Medialogy education have different interests within the Medialogy curriculum, but had a desire to know how they could use their knowledge, skills and competences from their study when graduating. In order to let them experience this first hand, and to improve employability, we wanted to enable learning activities where students could experience collaboration, communication and management of a cross-disciplinary project, with a goal to produce a purposeful game. These skills are included in the AAU Problem Based Learning curriculum, but are not stated as explicit learning goals and are not especially valued in students work. Thus, our basic idea is that students should be embedded in a larger, more complexly organized game production group, and that they would get motivated to develop and practice technical skills needed for game and interactive media productions. Over the last four years, the concept has developed to a production environment very close to a real game company, where students could practice technical-, communicative- and management skills.
Currently, there is not much documentation about using game development as a learning environment, especially not at university level. In order to gain more knowledge and develop new learning environments aimed at enabling students to practice technical, communication and management skills, we have started 4 years ago to organize and document the game production semesters, changing the formats and experiments every year. In this paper, we will summarize this 4 year’s long study, where a multitude of methods has been used, such as surveys, interviews, and observations, including recent interviews with the participants from the first interventions and analyses of the processes. Our investigation indicates that students are becoming more motivated and that they are acquiring a lot of experience in fields, which are not directly a part of the curriculum, such as communication in larger teams, management of complex productions and technical production skills.