Game for learning

• Main Author: Low, Wei Rong
• Other Authors: Shen Zhiqi
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2021
• Subjects: Engineering::Computer science and engineering::Software::Software engineering
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/148736
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

The key aim of this project is to design and develop a serious game for learning purposes. The learning material in this case will be on a Computer Science module taught in Nanyang Technological University (NTU), called Advanced Software Engineering (ASE). Naturally, this means that the target audience for the game will be university students aged between 17-25 years old. In order to do so, a comprehensive study must first be done to determine the entire reasoning of what makes games attractive to humans. This will help address the question of whether a game approach is justified in the first place. The concept of flow and self-intrinsic motivation comes into play here. The next step is to determine usage of games in education, and how effective they have been, by conducting literature reviews on similar projects and dissertations. Through the examples of Run Macro and PlayIT, where serious games have been successfully implemented in a classroom-based setting to enhance learning, we see that there is great potential in serious games getting students to learn course material better, in terms of their motivation levels and performance. With the approach justified, we begin to draw up our own game design. Drawing upon our research, we aim to create a game that follows good design principles, in order to guarantee as much success as possible in getting students to be absorbed into the game, in wanting to perform well in the game, and hence in subconsciously wanting to learn the course material better. These principles include ease of understanding and play, scaling difficulty, non-repetitiveness, self-improvement and achievement, memory retention, and monitoring and input. We settle on the idea of a 2D platformer game with a medieval theme, calling it ‘Tower Ascension’, as we believe it is a genre that students will be interested in. A ‘Game First’ approach is also adopted as the best basis for integrating the educational component with the gaming component. A Lo-fi prototype is drawn up in order to have a rough overlay to base our game implementation on. A project schedule is also designed so that we can keep track of the required completion time and key milestones. We then begin on our game implementation, first defining Unity as the software to be used, before moving on to the game features and the process of how they are implemented. This is done through the implementation of scenes, gameobjects, and scripts. An Agile model is also adopted to allow iterative testing of our game and to get audience feedback during development. When the game development is complete, deployment is carried out to students who have taken ASE before. Deployment in a live environment will help us to gather feedback, in order to ascertain what parts of the game can be revised and improved, as well as get a sensing of its success and effectiveness among students. Our target deployment platform are PCs, since they are the most popular medium for games. The project ends off with an analysis of the survey results from the students after deployment and a conclusion, as well as future directions that the project may take. It is deemed that the game has been successful in increasing students’ interest in the course and enhancing their learning of the course materials, as well as being sufficiently enjoyable for repeated play. There are however, potential issues and limitations still, and these are targeted to be addressed in our future recommendations section.