Martin Sillaots - What is a Serious Game?
Educational games combine education and knowledge with entertainment. It doesn’t matter whether they are board games, role games or computer games. In today’s information society digital learning games are becoming increasingly popular, since they are an easy tool to motivate children to learn, says Martin Sillaots, lecturer of Serious Games at Tallinn University.
Educational games combine education and knowledge with entertainment. It doesn’t matter whether they are board games, role games or computer games. In today’s information society digital learning games are becoming increasingly popular, since they are an easy tool to motivate children to learn, says Martin Sillaots, lecturer of Serious Games at Tallinn University.
Educational computer games belong in the serious games category. Serious games are created for a serious reason (e.g. national defence, health, city planning, safety or education).
Good examples of educational games are Time Mesh, an adventure game for studying European history, Silang for studying English or Busy Workers to teach about health and safety at the office. There is a plethora of games created for an educational purpose. The Serious Games network’s portal SEGAN has a good overview of these.
Creating serious games offer many chances to realize your ideas for new games. If it seems as though commercial game companies have already created everything there is to create, then creating educational games takes little else than combining challenges from commercial games with educational tasks. At the same time, creating visually entertaining and educative learning games is a tough challenge, which needs intensive cooperation between developers, designers and pedagogues.
Creating learning games can be studied as a short course at Tallinn Summer School or a two-year Master’s programme – Digital Learning Games. The studies include conceptual planning of the game, storytelling, graphic design, programming and everything else it takes to turn an idea into a working prototype. The games are developed in small teams with members of different backgrounds (programmers, designers, teachers, etc.).
Creating digital games is also a module of the Tallinn University School of Digital Technologies Informatics Bachelor’s course. During the programming internship this summer, students came up with the following games:
- World Quiz, a trivia game about the economic statistics of countries
- Color Space, a 3D flight simulator for studying the RGB colour model
- EcoHouse, an economic simulator about renovating buildings and saving energy.
Even pure entertainment games teach us decision making and risking, as they offer a safe environment for failure. Even if it seems as though a game has no educational value whatsoever, it still increases our hand-eye coordination, or the teamwork between the hand and the brain.
Even elements from commercial games can be used to increase the activity of students. Game-based learning uses existing commercial or learning games to diversify lessons or create a, exciting learning environment. This approach is called gamification.