Serious Games for Reflective Learning (original) (raw)
Reflecting on our personal experiences and emotions can be a great mechanism for learning how to behave and react in certain specific situations. Unfortunately there are many such situations that people either never encounter or avoid in their daily lives. This limits the opportunity to learn through such personal experiences but with new tools like serious games it is now possible to create 'real new learning experiences' in a safe virtual environment. In this way, serious games can provide these missing learning opportunities because they allow people to access a potentially unlimited pool of environments through which they can experience those situations in a risk-free way and thereby enlarge the spectrum of their knowledge. Furthermore, well developed serious games have the potential to induce in players a state of flow in which they are so involved in the game activity that nothing else seems to matter (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990). When players reach this state they are more motivated to learn and, by reflecting on their actions and consequences within the serious game, players can translate the knowledge acquired in this virtual environment into the real world. This chapter describes some of the work carried out in the 'MIRROR project' which focuses on reflective learning where adults' motivation to learn and reflect through games is being researched. It introduces briefly the project and the theoretical framework and then describes in detail the serious game that was created for research. The last part of this chapter focuses on users' evaluations and describes some lessons learned about the importance of guidance and of a de-briefing session, thus highlighting the potential of serious games for collaborative knowledge construction.
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