Designing a Game to Help Higher Education Students Develop Their Note-Taking Skills

Abstract

Taking effective notes is an important skill in academic and professional settings and one that is cultivated primarily in Higher Education (HE). However, students often find it difficult to effectively record important information in their notes [37], while it has been suggested that they often record less than 50% of the key information of a lecture [15].Games can be a powerful way to help students learn [30]. Yet, to date, there is scarce empirical research on games specifically designed to help HE students develop note-taking skills where the design has been directly informed by note-taking learning theories. This study applies such theories in the design of the mechanics for an educational game for note-taking, entitled Investigate: Tudors, and evaluates their effectiveness and engaging potential.Results from qualitative evaluations with HE students showed that the game was a successful tool to help them develop notetaking skills. This article discusses the game design approach and the evaluation results, and contributes with effective strategies for designing serious games for note-taking.

Serious Games in Higher Education in the Transforming Process to Education 4.0—Systematized Review

“…Two of these games additionally use points [44][45][46]. Points are awarded in seven other games, but never without using an additional game element [27,32,35,37,39,41,50]. Similarly, the element of challenge is mostly used in combination with other elements [27,28,31,35,[37][38][39][40]49].…”

“…Points are awarded in seven other games, but never without using an additional game element [27,32,35,37,39,41,50]. Similarly, the element of challenge is mostly used in combination with other elements [27,28,31,35,[37][38][39][40]49]. Only in one of the nine games, the one from the logistics area, are challenges exclusively used as an element [38].…”

“…Only in one of the nine games, the one from the logistics area, are challenges exclusively used as an element [38]. Five of the games employ puzzles [27,28,[30][31][32], three use surprising or random elements [29,39,41], two use ranks [28,32], and two character advancement [28,41]. One game uses rewards and hidden content [40].…”

“…The majority of the games are realized as a desktop computer game (n = 7) or online or web app (n = 9). Apart from games outside a specific subject area, desktop games are mostly used in the field of medicine [27,40,41,43], while online/web app games are often used in computer science [29,30,[33][34][35]. Two games describe a setup where teams work with computers but the game takes place in presence [24,45,46].…”

“…Teaching non-technical skills is the focus of the remaining games. Deniozou et al [27] aim to teach students to take better notes. The game Compete!…”