Abstract:

At the beginning of their academic careers, university students face new tasks and processes, which lay the foundations of future research. In the long term, we recognize that most people struggle to grasp the basic principles of academic and scientific work, which consist of systematic search for the current state of knowledge, identification of opportunities for further research, designing their own research, and implementing it in the form of theoretical representations of their academic abilities.

In conjunction with the shift from in person to online teaching and hybrid environments, interest in the use and creation of educational and serious games has increased in recent years, which many teachers see as useful tools for transferring knowledge, strengthening learning, and stimulating the discovery of new practices and methods in the learning process. Although educational games are aimed directly at transferring specific knowledge, serious games offer a broader space for creators to implement entertainment mechanisms and to present information educationally to the player in a less prominent way and to acquire the competencies necessary for a knowledge-based society.

In cooperation with the partner institutions of Slovakia, Norway and Germany, the project "Games and Active Learning Methods in Education" creates the opportunity to develop innovative educational video games of different types and formats, aimed at specific problems and requirements of first-year students and introducing them to the academic foundations in a playful manner.

The team at the University of Comenius in Bratislava works on creating a game prototype that enables players (students) to acquire the basic habits of writing the work: selecting the correct source, evaluating it, using and paraphrasing the appropriate sources, selecting the appropriate research methods, implementing them, and overall compiling the final work.

In this paper, we will present the basic background, research, and procedures for actively using students to participate actively in all stages of the project's implementation to develop game that meets the needs of the academic community, as well as the ideas of the target group, young people starting their academic careers.

Keywords:

Serious games, higher education, scientific writing, knowledge transfer.