Interactive Signalling Laboratory: A Physical Serious Game for Railway Operations Education

Abstract

Railway operations are a complex socio-technical system shaped by state-based logic, relational dependencies, and temporal constraints that are difficult to visualise. Many core principles remain implicit and are only indirectly accessible through regulations, diagrams, or operational rules, which makes railway operations difficult to teach. Conventional teaching approaches often reach their limits when conveying such dynamic, interdependent systems. Although digital railway simulations are widely used, they primarily support individual interaction through abstract interfaces. There is still a need for collaborative, haptic learning environments that encourage shared reasoning and make implicit operational knowledge visible. Therefore, this paper introduces the Interactive Signalling Laboratory (SigLab), a physical serious game based on a modified wooden railway. It teaches railway operations through the interplay of vehicles, signalling, and infrastructure. SigLab applies a discrete abstraction of a continuous system, with speed represented as track segments per round. This serves a didactic purpose by making principles discussable that would be harder to observe in a continuous simulation. Its core didactic principle is collaborative gameplay, requiring learners to operate the system jointly and negotiate terminology, thereby rendering otherwise invisible rules tangible. Because state updates are performed stepwise on local track segments in fixed rounds, SigLab can be interpreted as behaving like a cellular automaton. Physical interaction is assumed to support the externalisation and negotiation of tacit mental models. However, systematic documentation of physical game-based approaches in this domain remains limited. To address this gap, SigLab is presented as a practice-based case study refined over seven years. Practice-based insights suggest that SigLab supports shared concept formation, improves system-level understanding, intensifies peer-to-peer dialogue, and fosters systematic reasoning about operational processes. Learners must articulate assumptions and resolve conflicts collaboratively. Open challenges remain regarding model granularity, scalability, and assessment integration. The paper contributes design insights for physical serious games in higher education. It identifies the need for systematic evaluation and outlines next steps toward empirical validation, aiming to inform future work on game-based learning for complex, rule-driven systems.