Voxel generation. Raising awareness for informatics and society among high-school pupils through a game-design project

Abstract

Our research project was aimed at teaching high-school pupils game design skills and raising their awareness for the subject area “informatics and society.” A project-based-teaching approach enabled us to incorporate social learning by having teams of pupils work on informatics-and-society topics and subsequently design their own games. The focus of this article is an online survey conducted twice, at the beginning and end of the pupils’ project participation, showing if and how the participants’ attitudes towards and awareness of informatics and society changed during this school year. We discuss the most important survey results, also in relation to studies on internet use of adolescents in the German-speaking countries. Additionally, an evaluation group discussion with the involved teachers provides expert validity. We found that our project-based and social-learning approach was successful in raising awareness for informatics and society as well as in teaching game design.

Using Game Design to Teach Informatics and Society Topics in Secondary Schools

“…A survey was designed to provide the project team with insight into the youths' knowledge on and attitudes towards informatics and society [1]. The first set of the survey was conducted at the beginning of the project and comprised 42 questions; the second set was conducted after the students had finished their task of designing a learning game themselves (i.e., at the end of the project from the students' point of view) and consisted of 28 questions, all of which had already been asked in the first set.…”

“…However, in general there were no statistically significant differences between the participants and the control group. Still, there is evidence by tendency that the project participants' awareness for socio-technological issues was being raised: for example, security and privacy online were considered more important; also, internet expertise and time spent online were assessed more realistically after the year-long project participation [1].…”

“…Many games also contained elements of both the trivia and objective race genres. Other less popular genres included simulation (1), strategy (1) and word games (1). The most used game mechanics in the board games were roll/spin and move (7), meaning to roll dice and move a piece accordingly, and linear movement (7) along a path on the game board.…”

“…The 7 digital games were spread across different genres and contain elements of jump'n'run games (2), role-playing games (2), first-person horror games (1), adventure games (1) and beat'em up games (1). The most used mechanics of the games include fighting (6), platforming (4), interactive narrative and dialogues (3), and loot and levelling (2).…”

“…The games incorporate topics from informatics and society, which encompass the larger social context of computing, such as copyright, privacy, cyberbullying, technical literacy and social media use. The learning effects observed in a quantitative survey are presented with full detail in a different paper [1]. In terms of learning goals, the primary objective of the project was not only to convey knowledge around informatics and society topics to school students but to let them experience academic research practice, in this case game design and analysis, firsthand.…”