USING SERIOUS GAMES IN HIGHER EDUCATION. AN APPLICATION IN ACTUARIAL STUDIES

Learning strategies and educational resources are facing new challenges in higher education, partly due to the availability of new interactive technologies and resources, including those related to gaming in a general sense. Integrated into the general project on innovative approaches to actuarial education, carried out by the network of learning and teaching innovation in Actuarial Science at the University of Malaga, we have designed and put into practice some interactive resources based on serious gaming in three courses of the MSc in Actuarial Science. Most of the lecturers that make up the network have a long experience in using innovative educational resources in the Actuarial Science study programs at the Universidad de Málaga.

The results of previous projects and experiences on this field suggested that our students highly value the availability of interactive educational resources, but at the same time they often complain of an excessive workload in most of their courses. As a consequence, our current approach consists of delivering online resources with a simple design, easy to use, that require short time to be completed. Furthermore, to incentive the use of our online resources we also designed some of them with a gamification component. Therefore, we enrich the range of interactive resources types of our project with two serious gaming puzzles: a word-search and a crossword.

For the courses involved in this experience, Insurance law, Survival models, and Stochastic processes, interactive word-search and crossword puzzles have been designed and used. In each course, our students had a maximum of four of these resources available at their virtual learning environments (Moodle platforms). These resources were not compulsory, as they are offered as a complement to the general course strategy, although most of the students carried out the puzzles.

Regarding the technical aspects of the design, we looked for a high degree of interactivity, but also simplicity. Thus, a combination of Java-script and CSS was chosen to allow the use of the puzzles over several platforms and devices. In addition, both of them are randomly generated with each access, in such a way that a student can use it several times.

Finally, the results of this project have been assessed by means of a survey delivered to the students that used the resources. The main results suggest that our students highly value these kind of resources, with particular emphasis in their gamification nature, which reduces the stress of some courses, and even most of the surveyed students declared that they would like to have more of these resources available in the study program.