From UH-Clear Lake Communications
Games—the word alone invokes images of children sitting in front of screens for hours. Generally, the word is not associated with adults who are engaged in constructive work. Nevertheless, gamification and “serious” games, which are defined as games with a specific, measurable learning objective, have become an instrumental tool for acquiring new skills in the workplace.
The use of gamification in education is on the rise, and so is the need for people with the ability to create motivating and challenging serious games that employ real-life scenarios and stories to enrich the learning experience.
“It’s become an extremely efficient training method,” said University of Houston Clear Lake’s Associate Professor of Software Engineering Soma Datta, who is among about a dozen professors from across the university’s four colleges who teaches courses in the newly-available Serious Games and Simulations bachelor of arts degree.
Although UH-Clear Lake offers other interdisciplinary degrees across just two colleges, the Serious Games and Simulations degree is the first ever to consist of courses from all four—the Colleges of Education, Human Sciences and Humanities, Business and Science and Engineering.
Datta said her own research supports the idea that traditional training modules aren’t as helpful in teaching skills needed in real-life situations as using games.
“It’s become a pedagogical thing, for understanding concepts, gamification helps students understand and retain information better,” she said. “In my own research, I am conducting a virtual microbiology lab which will mimic a real lab. We put experiments into the games, and computer science and software engineering students are simulating everything they will see in the lab while they’re doing those experiments.”
The pandemic, Datta said, was the biggest reason for the pivot to find alternative education models. In applying virtual gaming techniques to teaching, she believes the key is bringing experiences into the classroom and making them real.
“In a strange way, the pandemic turned out to be a silver lining,” she said. “Students could not come to the lab in person. We showed that no matter what could prevent students from coming to the lab, they can still learn in a virtual lab with the experiments they need to learn put into the game.”
She said the Serious Games and Simulations degree could be a differentiator because generally, computer science and software engineering students do not start out learning the game technology. “They’d be a little behind because they’d have to learn it first, then implement it,” she said.
“This way, they’re learning it, using it and applying it, receiving experiential learning. Now everything is simulated. If you’re going to become a pilot, you’ll train on a flight simulator. That’s a serious game,” she explained.
“You’re playing with something, but you have to learn the skills and apply them. It used to be that medical students would practice skills on cadavers, but now those skills are taught more effectively using serious games,” she said. “There’s no end to the ways this degree can be applied.”
