Game Design and Teaching for Understanding

Abstract

This paper will look at how game design can be related to Learning Outcomes (LO) based on Blooms Taxonomy, and to the Teaching for Understanding (TfU) framework. I argue that traditional assessments often offer learners a closed pathway to solutions by delimiting the problem by title and required sources whereas requiring learners to design a game on a topic requires a research process which explores a wider range of possibilities. Game design as an assessment requires students to cross the bridge from narrative descriptions of problems to expressing them in the procedural rhetoric of game mechanics. Whereas narrative explanations always include an element of ambiguity, game mechanics require explicit rules. Based on actual cases in teaching, I will lay out how the different elements of a game design assessment fits with both learning outcomes and Teaching for Understanding. As Teaching for Understanding is focussed on process initiated by generative questions rather than outcomes, it is a better framework for developing the skills required to explore contemporary complex and 'wicked' systematic and systemic problems.