Abstract:

The paper describes a brand new and innovative software. The program is a framework built to allow the development of video games to support teaching and learning regarding the theme of Project Management (PM). A Sandbox has been created that allows the topic of PM to be customized and characterized within different contexts. The software, by its nature, is totally scalable and allows the definition and management of the main elements of various type of projects. The idea of creating a Sandbox that would allow different contexts to be presented came out in order to reach as many audiences as possible; organizations (public or private companies) typically having different needs based on the product/service context and obviously in the academic world for different school/university courses. The tool is customizable in all its arts from the management of contingencies to the antagonists that are present within the system and that hinder the project, and even to the types of project managers one wants to represent as the main user. Such a granular system, however, requires a great deal of customization. To come to the aid of this area, a number of artificial intelligence models have been considered to populate the narrative and certain parts of the video game, such as contingencies, the description of the project manager, and many other situations. The system then is able to accommodate elements produced by GPT chat or other AI systems in a way that lightens the administrator's work and allows the administrator to focus primarily on the metaphor of the project to be built and hence manage. The PM principals were designed with the collaboration of a number of university professors who helped building the system aimed at both an introductory aspect and a post-course evaluation aspect. In general, to manage a project, it is necessary to simulate the organisation of an event such as a wedding, a moving/relocation or a tourist trip, all of which have milestones, a budget and the need to satisfy different stakeholders. It is also fundamental to assess the potential risks in advance and therefore to manage possible unforeseen events during the development of the project. It is therefore required to choose a scenario that is best suited to a transversal training and therefore to the widest possible audience. We have chosen the Wedding event, as the first context which,on our opinion. best embodies the "playful" and project management components. The player, through the accomplishment of a series of actions will have the aim to complete at best (cost, time, performance/quality of the result) a wedding project, having to manage during the conducting of the game some unforeseen events and constraints and wanting to reach at the most the satisfaction of all the stakeholders (bride and groom, guests, priest). The game has been developed in order to be useful as a tool for assessing initial skills, repeated at the end of the course to record the skills acquired, or it can be part of preparing test for accompanying the new project managers to the course and thus represent the leitmotif of the course.The integration of an Edutainment Serious game in the learning model is surely the originality of the project that the authors describe in this paper. In addition, the idea to using the metaphor of Wedding event as the project to govern during the playing of the game seems to be very challenging and easy to understand for a large scale type of students/player.

Keywords:

Project Management, Serious Games, Learning, Teaching, Artificial Intelligence, GPT Chat, Wedding.