Abstract:

In recent years, there has been an increasing emphasis on innovative forms of teaching. Improving the quality of didactic methods and tools through the design and implementation of cooperative games was also the aim of the Erasmus+ project GameIT: Gamestorming for Innovative Teaching, where we designed 5 board games to promote the development of 21st century competences at higher education level. In this article, we present one of four role-playing games, called StoryLand of Options (SLO Game), where players take on the role of a famous Slovenian person and, through a journey through Slovenia, learn about the country's culture and sights, and face a number of challenges by creating stories using the most famous Slovenian folk stories as a starting point. Through playing the game, students have the opportunity to develop communication and cooperation skills, creative and logical thinking, and awareness and openness towards intercultural differences, which is an important aspect of integration into 21st century society. The game was created according to a methodology for the development of role-playing games, which was also produced within the project. The research was both quantitative and qualitative. It involved 38 students who answered a questionnaire and 3 teachers who filled in an observation form. Results showed that students learnt about our country and culture, developed communication and cooperation skills in English, developed intercultural awareness and tolerance for differences and improved their decision making skills, which were also goals of the game. Although the results show that the goals have been achieved, there is still a lot of possibilities to improve the game by adding more Slovenian folk stories as a starting point, as the number of stories prepared by students is currently limited. This would also have the effect that the game could be played several times and the content would not be repeating. The game could be further improved by more testing and feedback. The game is also easily adaptable and can be used in many areas of education, and we do not rule out the possibility of bringing it to an online platform.

Keywords:

Role-playing game, game-based learning, innovative teaching, 21st century skills.