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Serious games open up many new opportunities for complex skills learning in higher education. The inherent complexity of such games though, requires large efforts for their development. This paper presents a framework for serious game design, which aims to reduce the design complexity at both conceptual, technical and practical levels. The approach focuses on a relevant subset of serious games, labelled scenario-based games. At the conceptual level it identifies the basic elements that make up the static game configuration; it also describes the game dynamics, i.e. the state changes of the various game components in the course of time. At the technical level it presents a basic system architecture, which comprises various building tools. Various building tools will be explained and illustrated with technical implementations that are part of the Emergo toolkit for scenario-based game development. At the practical level, a set of design principles are presented for controlling and reducing game design complexity. The principles cover the topics of game structure, feedback and game representation, respectively. Practical application of the framework and the associated toolkit is briefly reported and evaluated.

Searching for information on the World Wide Web (WWW) basically comes down to locating an appropriate Web site and to retrieving relevant information from that site. This study examined the effect of a user's WWW experience on both phases of the search process. Twenty‐five students from two schools for Dutch pre‐university education were observed while performing three search tasks. The results indicate that subjects with WWW‐experience are more proficient in locating Web sites than are novice WWW‐users. The observed differences were ascribed to the experts' superior skills in operating Web search engines. However, on tasks that required subjects to locate information on specific Web sites, the performance of experienced and novice users was equivalent—a result that is in line with hypertext research. Based on these findings, implications for training and supporting students in searching for information on the WWW are identified. Finally, the role of the subjects' level of domain expertise is discussed and directions for future research are proposed.

This study examined the use of weblogs as a means to promote student teachers' reflective practice. The assumption that weblogs are suitable tools for supporting and stimulating reflection on action in teacher training and consequently for enhancing the students' ability to reflect, was explored. Three groups of student teachers used weblogs during an eight-week internship for reflection on teaching practice. Students were asked (a) to reflect on their own teaching experiences and (b) to provide peer feedback. Analyses of the student contributions show that weblogs are useful for reflection on critical incidents in the classroom and that they can stimulate interconnectivity in groups of students. Unfortunately weblogs do no incite deep reflection or spiral reflection. This can only be the result of explicit reflection instruction. This exploratory study further shows that large-scale quantitative research is needed to back up the premise that weblogs are suitable tools for reflection.