An Empirical Examination of Behavioral Factors in Creative Development of Game Prototypes

Abstract

In the last few years, several learning programs, workshops, technologies, and activities have been introduced and applied to game prototyping activities. The research goal of this work is to investigate how participants experience game prototyping activities. This paper presents a one-day intensive course consisting of both learning and hands-on sessions with open source software (OSS) tools, tangible materials, and sensor boards for creative development of games prototypes. The intensive course program was developed using the empirical experience of the instructors from numerous prior programs. We present the results of an empirical examination regarding participants’ attitude towards the program. A group of 12 MSc/PhD students, teachers, and designers participated in the program in our empirical evaluation. We used a survey grounded in motivational factors for technology and open-ended questions to obtain both quantitative and qualitative data from the participants. Quantitative statistical analysis indicates that, in our study, participants’ satisfaction and activity’s usefulness are the most influential factors for participants’ intention to attend similar activities in the future. Qualitative analysis suggests improvements on how to prepare the participants, introduce the software used in the courses, and enrich the variety of the materials in our program

Entertainment, engagement, and education: Foundations and developments in digital and physical spaces to support learning through making

“…The advances of digital environments, technologies, manufacturing equipment, and community spaces offer diverse opportunities for making practices to facilitate learning, especially when supported by engaging and joyful entertainment technologies and designed in an appropriate pedagogical manner. During the last years, we have seen various hardware and software supporting students to conduct scientific explorations (Chu et al, 2017), create e-textiles, jewelries and wearables (Buechley & Eisenberg, 2008), design simulations and videogames (Torrente et al, 2014), design and code robotic systems (Takacs et al, 2016), create sophisticated games and various programming applications (Kafai & Vasudevan, 2015;Giannakos, Jaccheri & Morasca, 2013). Thus, the plethora of technologies and practices developed during the last years to support making in education enhances the traditional learning with new expressive qualities.…”