This study examines the possibility of creating a roleplaying game as a tool for starting conversation about diversity and inclusion in games, specifically for the Game Development programs at the University of Skövde. First it is examined why it is needed, how other games have been used for educational purposes, what to think about when creating spaces of dialogue, and what it is like to teach the topics in game education. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the testing of the game was limited. The project uses three different ways of evaluation; interviews with faculty members at the University, feedback on a design document and an online playtest. The results suggest that the game could potentially be used to gamify some aspects of dialogue about diversity and inclusion within the curriculums of the Game Development programs at the University of Skövde, as a compliment alongside pre-existing lectures and seminars.

Educational simulations can help mitigate the natural gap between traditional education styles and the current professional world. Researchers at BYU have developed an educational simulation solution called Playable Case Studies (PCSs). PCSs are simulations that expose the user to real world scenarios and problems within a pre-built environment. With rising demand and use of these educational simulations, there is a need for easy and inexpensive ways to develop these simulations or Playable Case Studies (PCSs). We propose a content management system (CMS) that is tied to a system that utilizes dynamic modules that make up these simulations. We present a basic design and identify core functionality of the system. We include our results from utilizing this system and what future developments can enable the goal of easy and inexpensive development of PCSs. In this study, we identify the design features needed for an easy to use, efficient content management system for educational playable case studies. We began by identifying both pain points in our old system and the features that would address these issues. We then designed and built a new system that included these features. In the testing of this new system, we primarily looked at the ease of building a new PCS with minimal technical knowledge. Although this project was a success overall, there are still points of failure due to the direct manipulation of JSON by content creators (who were not all developers), among other minor issues that need correcting. Overall, we found that our design was effective in providing an efficient platform for creating and maintaining PCSs.

The purpose of incorporating digital educational games in educational settings is to engage the students' desire to learn. The aim of the syllabus for upper secondary school, as expressed by Skolverket (2011) is to support the students for lifelong learning and in order to do so, motivation is needed. However, a problematic gap can be found between “games” and “formal education” which are two different concepts which cross paths in this study. One path shows the foundation of the Swedish steering documents, and the other displays the motivational aspects of implementing digital educational games in educational settings. This qualitative research uses questionnaire surveys with structured questions and semi-structured follow-up interviews via email in order to examine to what degree digital educational games can be implemented in the English 6 classroom. It investigates the effectiveness of digital educational games in regard to English teaching and teachers’ attitudes and beliefs. The results display different approaches teachers could take when incorporating digital educational games in their classroom but also show significant factors such as teachers' experiences in the digital classroom. The research concludes that digital educational games can be used to encourage student motivation and in the teaching practices of upper secondary school teachers in Malmö. This is therefore an important area that should be further researched to ensure that teachers receive sufficient guidance and experience for using digital educational games in the English classroom.

With the development of media technology and game evolution, games are endowed with multiple purposes and functions. Some scholars believe that the game is the supplement of the real world, which can affect the players' psychology and behaviour. Numerous studies show that games can make players accept challenges, overcome obstacles, arouse positive emotions and solve problems. Therefore, academia's research on games and related topics in learning has become increasingly popular. In response, different models have emerged to evaluate the design of active educational games.This research discusses how different game mechanisms affect players. Also, this study used a prototype game as output media to examine the impact of various game mechanisms on learning. The purpose of this study is to explore how to choose a more suitable game mechanism in the design of educational games. The research results include that some game mechanisms promote learning motivation and improve learning outcomes. At the same time, some game mechanisms have the risk of reducing learning motivation. Through these findings, the researcher of this study believes that educational games can bring positive influence and help to players' learning. However, how to choose a suitable game mechanism in the design of educational games is worthy of serious consideration for making design decisions.

In this paper, the author examines the concept of explorable explanations. It has emerged as a genre of educational software within the last 7 years, yet descriptions of it are vague at best. The author works with the genre through a generic design approach that consists of an analysis of existing explorables and the design of three iterations of the author's own explorable explanation on the topic of neural networks. 22 examples, of which 9 are presented in-depth, are analyzed with educational theory and games research theory as tools. It is found that explorable explanations tend to be digital experiences with a high degree of interactivity that attempt to teach facts, concepts and procedures to the user. Furthermore, the author embarks on a design process of creating explorable explanations of their own to understand what can be relevant when designing and evaluating an explorable explanation. The paper is concluded with reflections on the employed method in the project. Future work is also briefly outlined about what impact the analysis and design work can have on the practice of other designers seeking to work with the genre, as well as to other researchers.

The concept of serious games, or using games and gaming technologies for purposes other than purely entertainment, became popularized with the creation of the Serious Games Initiative in 2002 and has continued to grow. While this trend may appear new, the use of games for learning has a rich history and the idea of using a game as a learning platform is an established concept that had has withstood the test of time. Research in this area must move from if games can teach, to how do we improve games that do. Proponents of serious games suggest that they should improve motivation, time on task, motivation to learn, and a litany of other benefits based primarily on the thought that what works in an entertainment game will work in a learning game. Unfortunately, this might not always be the case. For example, a commonly held misconception in learning games is that competition will motivate learner to succeed, as it motivates players of an entertainment game to continue to play. This is, however, not well supported by the learning science literature. Cooperative goal structures commonly lead to increased motivation to learn as well as improved learning outcomes when compared to competition. This research seeks to provide a framework to view games for learning and more specifically explore the structure of challenge in the context of cooperative and competitive goal structures, as well as explore the use of the word game and how it could possibly modify the expectations of the learner.

While methods of creative play are still utilized occasionally in elementary education, by the time students reach college there are fewer opportunities for them to play in order to learn creatively in the classroom. Often, they are bored or uninspired by “traditional” composition instruction, where they read essays and then emulate their structure. Students can sometimes struggle to find ways to compose, both academically and creatively. I have seen in my classrooms the efficacy of giving students more flexibility and freedom in their ways of composing. This project proposes that play—the serious “work of childhood” (attributed to Piaget)—is just as essential in the college composition classroom. Giving students ways to access their imaginations, through visual and multimodal composition, making activities, metaphors, and other infusions of creative play pedagogy in the classroom and beyond—are not niche methods of instruction. Rather, I assert that play-learning helps form thirdspaces of play that I term playspaces. Specifically, in this dissertation I inquire through teacher/practitioner research to explore these questions: 1) What are some of the possibilities and limitations of play pedagogy for the composing processes of three first-year college composition students and their instructor? a. How are students using play pedagogy in the learning space? What functions might it serve or not serve? b. How am I implementing my play pedagogy in our classroom? What does play pedagogy mean for me as a teacher? c. How does play pedagogy inform the space and spatial understanding of the composition classroom? This qualitative study examines what happens when play pedagogy is employed in the college writing classroom, using arts-based research (ABR) including narrative inquiry as its main methods. The analysis for my dissertation uses what I’ve termed spatial thematic analysis in the form of longer narrative vignettes to attempt to reconstruct the spaces of play of each of the three students in the study as well as myself as teacher/researcher struggling with play and writing. These vignettes focus on Diana—a student who moved between accepting and rejecting the invitation across a semester paired with my own struggles during the pandemic to write and my use of collage to find a sense of play again, Lito—a student who accepted the invitation throughout the semester and the freedoms that emerged in his composing processes and meta-reflections, and Jenny—a student who digs deeper into one of those freedoms—the concept of deep play—as a potential affordance in the college writing space. From these longer vignettes, I have summarized in the findings the themes that emerged from the study: the invitation to play, the freedoms of play pedagogy including: to work across mediums and modes, to make mistakes and fail, to create and imagine, and to explore the self, including the opportunity to engage in deep play in their composing work, and the importance of spatial understandings of play pedagogy. This study seeks not just to define playspace as a third space of play-learning in the college writing classroom, but also to find the essential components of these spaces to generalize the structure for teachers hoping to use their own playful pedagogies in their classrooms. Keywords: composition, playspace, spaces of play, playful teaching, play pedagogy, pedagogy of play, creative play, play learning, thirdspace, third space, college literacy, visual literacy, multimodal learning

The ability to design controlled, unconfounded experiments in order to test hypotheses via the Control of Variables Strategy (CVS) is fundamental to all scientific reasoning and inquiry, considered a cornerstone of critical thinking as a whole which enables individuals to make valid causal inferences (Kuhn, 2005a). CVS is considered so crucial to science and science education, in fact, that various scientific and governmental agencies a have begun including it in student curricula, such as the Framework for K-12 Science Education (National Research Council, 2012), Benchmarks for science literacy (American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1993), and the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS; NGSS Lead States, 2013). However, despite its unique power and flexibility as a cognitive tool and its centrality to the entire architecture of scientific inquiry, most children do not spontaneously develop use of CVS without some form of instruction or scaffolding. According to the National Academy of Sciences (1995), students of various ages still have difficulty manipulating variables and conceptualizing controlled experiments. Thus, a significant amount of research effort has gone into the examination of the circumstances under which the learning and transfer of CVS is best supported. One such avenue has been within the realm of embodied cognition. Embodied cognition is a concept in Cognitive Science which suggests people create mental perceptual simulations of concepts in order to understand them (Barsalou, 2004; Morrison and Tversky, 1997; Martin, 2007). In the realm of CVS research, the computerization of instructional and assessment materials has met with some success. Klahr, Triona, and Williams (2007), for example, found virtual training tasks in CVS to be equally effective as training tasks with real physical equipment, a result replicated by Smetana & Bell (2012), as well as Triona & Klahr, 2003). Nonetheless, even in these studies, the virtual tasks undertaken by students appear to largely be an extension of a classroom lecture, merely replicating the experience of a physical task without taking advantage of the more unique qualities of the medium. Black (2014) found strong evidence for the potential of video games as perceptually rich grounding environments for embodied learning. Further, significant literature exists establishing the beneficial impacts of game-based learning on motivation and engagement (e.g. Rigby & Przybylski, 2009; Cordova & Lepper, 1996; Malone, 1981). This study combines these two streams of research by investigating the impact of an interactive simulation game on scientific reasoning skills, specifically effective use of CVS. It seeks to know the impact of game-based learning on scientific reasoning skills and engagement with science, as well as whether structured or unstructured access to an interactive narrative simulation game has a differential impact on immediate learning and retention after a delay following formal instruction. Students were randomized into three groups—two with unstructured and structured access to the game and a control group and given tests of scientific reasoning at baseline, immediately following the training phase, and a week thereafter. They then took two surveys on their science engagement and game experience, the latter of which also included submitting a record of their thoughts and reactions while playing the game. The study found significant effects of group on all measures, with the game groups outperforming the control, and the unstructured group showing the strongest performance in the post-study test while the structured play group performed the most poorly in the retention test. The unstructured group also showed the highest level of intrinsic motivation, as well as higher self-determination and self-efficacy than the structured playing group in the science engagement survey. The dissertation begins with an establishment of a theoretical framework and literature review before going on to discuss the study and game design in detail. Results and implications are discussed in depth.

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Researchers have explored representations in traditional video games, yet have not significantly investigated the representations in video games used in classroom contexts. Moreover, socially marginalized group members’ perspectives are rarely centered in academic research. This dissertation examined representations of people, ideas, and stories in video games for classroom use, focusing on how 16 self-identified US Black women who were teachers, learners, or both have perceived and encountered them. Furthermore, it drew from cultural studies traditions, which encompass theories that provide the language and space for seeing the world as diverse and nuanced, such as social constructionism, intersectionality, and experience. Data were gathered through using three qualitative methods: content analysis, three individual interviews per participant, and a questionnaire. A theme was recognized when four or more participants referenced a mutual idea. The results of the first research question on in-game representations of race, social class, and gender showed that these constructs were represented through human characters, anthropomorphic characters, or avatar creation options for users. Each game’s overarching structure influenced how it approached representation, with longer games and those designed to be played multiple times having more frequent opportunities to demonstrate character building and convey complex representations. Many games also centered the socially privileged via their representations of people, avatar options, ideas, and stories. Social class was often represented through in-game purchases, possessions, hobbies, and settings. Users often needed to actively create or implement diverse representations in classrooms. The second research question, which addressed participants’ conceptualizations of ideal representations in games for classroom use, showed that overall, participants wanted to see games featuring character, narrative, and ideological diversity across many socially constructed categories, including race, gender, social class, ability, sexual orientation, religion, and age, although they did not all agree on how to approach such representations. They wanted games to be relatable to all audiences while also being sensitive to those who were affected by not being represented. Content-wise, they wanted to see representations that engaged multiple senses and included fantasy elements and opportunities for users to express their creativity. Most participants reported that they would not want games to represent violence, and several participants did not want them to include stereotypes, social -isms, or racial jokes. The third research question’s results showed that the relationship between participants’ perspectives on ideal representations, their experiences, and their individual-centered characteristics—which comprised role descriptors, social constructs, and personality traits—was highly contextual. Participants who self-identified using the same terms, or underwent similar experiences, did not consequently share the same views. Rather, participants’ thoughts on representation were specific to the intersections of their individual-centered characteristics and experiences. In conclusion, this study underscores that it is important to privilege complexity and diversity when examining texts and audiences. It demonstrates how academic research can center members of socially and culturally marginalized groups while preventing myths of group sameness from obscuring individuals’ perspectives. Representations in games for classroom use would benefit from teachers, media practitioners, and researchers acknowledging the diversity of classroom audiences while addressing traditional learning objectives. / Media & Communication