Game-Based Support for Vocational Teachers’ Competence Reflection in Professional Development Search

Abstract

Vocational teachers are expected to develop digital competences continuously. However, when they search for professional development opportunities, they are confronted with keyword-based search interfaces on professional development platforms that offer little guidance and rarely address their needs as adult learners. As a result, identifying learning pathways for professional growth can be difficult, especially for teachers with limited time and heterogeneous prior experiences with digital teaching. The joint project ELMeKS.digital develops a game-based entry point for vocational school teachers to search for professional development opportunities, framing lifelong professional learning as a self-directed, practice-oriented, and motivation-supportive process. To foster orientation and competence reflection, the platform is aligned with the European Framework for the Digital Competence of Educators (DigCompEdu), which structures key competence areas for teaching with digital technologies. This allows the platform to connect game-based interaction with competence-oriented self-reflection and personalised recommendations. Across these areas, teachers engage with mini-games that represent professional situations and digital teaching practices, for example, by identifying design flaws in presentation slides or reflecting on classroom-related digital decisions. Based on players’ performance across competence areas, the system generates tailored professional development recommendations. The paper presents the design rationale of the platform and findings from usability tests and think-aloud protocols with vocational teachers involved in the iterative development process. It examines to what extent game-based designs can reduce orientation problems in professional development discovery, support competence reflection and motivate teachers to engage in continuous learning. By focusing on vocational teachers as adult learners, the study contributes to current discussions on game-based learning for lifelong learning. It shows how playful, low-threshold, and competence-oriented digital environments support professional development search and help teachers navigate the professional development landscape in a more reflective and motivating way.