Abstract:

Serious computer games have become promising avenues to educate people in numerous application areas. Since serious computer games provide both entertainment and education, the idea of learning in a playful manner has become popular in higher education. Serious computer games provide an individual learning process because learners can play and test solutions within a defined game design. A progress-oriented design (i.e., reaching a goal) motivates learners to complete a task, while negative decisions and actions afford the opportunity for reconsideration and knowledge building. Learners who use serious computer games seem more motivated and committed to a given task than learners who follow a traditional learning approach. Moreover, serious computer games have additional benefits, like facilitating learning anywhere and anytime. This supports self-directed and research-oriented learning outside the classroom.

In this paper, we describe the concept and realization of a serious computer game for undergraduate students. The result, a mobile application named LINGURINTH, supports students of a linguistic study program to learn morphological, syntactic, and lexical aspects of a language. The motivation and commitment of students to this topic is often low because the topic is considered abstract by students. In order to increase motivation, we choose a serious computer game as a channel for this theoretical learning topic. The chosen game design follows a strategy game approach, wherein learners can reach the goal by making several decisions (e.g., collecting the right solution parts). Hence, the game requires no special manual skills or a fixed time interval in which users have to interact with the game. This makes the game easy to handle for a large user group, even if the learners have no gaming skills. The general game mechanics requires that learners find a way out of a maze. At certain waypoints, learners have to collect parts of the right solution based upon a level-wide quest (i.e., a question taken from the learning topic). For motivational reasons, the correctness of the collected solution part does not matter: i.e., it will not block the game progress. In terms of the game design, learners will pass every waypoint even if they collect the wrong solution part. However, learners must not exceed a certain number of wrong choices; otherwise, the level will have to be repeated. Thus, from the learning-theoretical point of view, the completion of the level is the main goal: additionally, the learner can follow the self-competitive goal to minimize their number of moves (e.g., complete the level with the minimum number of moves).

LINGURITH is realized as platform-independent so that maximum learners can be involved. We provide a formalization of the learning content for the selected topic. Based on this formalization, teachers can create new learning content and generate game levels without having technical skills. We evaluate the mobile application based on a user study.

Keywords:

Language learning, serious computer games, mobile learning, e-learning.