Fostering Awareness About Academic Success for First-Generation Students Through a Digital Serious Game

Abstract

In higher education, many academic support programs intend to enhance the student success. Some of them particularly focus on first generation students. This is the case of an innovative serious game entitled "Success" which aims at fostering awareness about contributing factors of success. The game proposes to embody a coach and guide a virtual student during his/her first semester. In this fictional universe, the virtual students are subject to daily events, invitations, professional/associative/cultural activities and school responsibilities. The coach's mission consists in helping them to self-organize and achieve what is expected to succeed including a healthy way of life. To that end, the coach must give them some advice and suggest to balance academic work and privacy. Our contribution focuses on the design process to create interactive and educational scenarios embedded in this serious game. It presents a model to describe different profiles of virtual students and indicators related to what can be considered as a healthy way of life. The model we propose allows to create a library of virtual students that the players can guide on the way of success.