Exploratory Learning Through
Educational Simulation & Games

Overall Course Themes

This course deals with aspects of the design process that are sometimes neglected. To design an instructional game well, you must be both systematic and intuitive, analytic and artistic. In mastering the ISD process, you've learned to handle the cognitive side of instruction (which, almost by definition, is the most important). In EDTEC 670, you'll also learn to deal with the affective side of instruction. Throughout the course we'll be addressing the questions: What makes some activities interesting or fun? How can we maximize enjoyment without sacrificing instructional quality? It's a difficult and fascinating challenge for any instructional designer.

A second major theme of the course involves the design of simulations. The questions that will dominate the second half of the course are these: How do we represent reality in a simulation? How do we balance simplicity, efficiency, and playability against realism, richness and complexity? These, too, are challenging design tasks.

Objectives

Upon completing this course, you'll be able to:

1. Explain selected psychological theories and models useful to describe motivational and affective aspects of instruction. The models will include the following: Keller's ARCS model; Csikszentmihalyi's flow model; Malone & Lepper's intrinsic motivation taxonomy.
   
   
2. Explain selected frameworks developed by master practitioners to analyze and design games and game-like experiences. These will include Schell's game design lenses, gamification strategies, and guidelines developed specifically for board games.
   
   
3. Analyze a situation that is currrently not engaging to its participants and apply principles of motivational design and gamification to it to improve it.
   
   
4. Design an educational board game that is flexible and effective, and document its rules, physical attributes, context of use, rationale, and variations.
   
   
5. Create face-to-face simulations, role plays and other activities designed to build social cohesion among learners and convey understanding of complex content.
   
   
6. Design and document an online educational experience and describe the motivational principles at work in the design.
   
   
7. Reflect on and explain the design processes you use in creating motivating educational products and experiences.

Course Schedule

Much of the work of the class will be done on your own schedule, either solo or in small groups. Unless otherwise noted below, both sections meets synchronously on Blackboard at Mondays at 4pm. Additional meeting times will be scheduled with subsets of the class later in the semester.

This will be taught as a flipped class. That is, most new information will be given to you in the form of readings, recorded presentations and solo exercises to be done ahead of time. We'll use our synchronous time together for discussion and activities that take advantage of having dozens of great brains all in one virtual place, not for lectures.

Readings

There are several required books for the course which may be ordered online by clicking on the link below. The campus bookstore at SDSU will not be stocking these books.

• Costikyan, G. & Davidson, D. (2011). Tabletop: Analog Game Design. Feedbooks.
• Keller, J. M. (2010). Motivational design for learning and performance: The ARCS model approach. New York: Springer.
• Schell, J. (2008).The art of game design: A book of lenses. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann.
• Zichermann, G., Cunningham, C. (2011). Gamification by design: Implementing game mechanics. Sausalito, CA: O'Reilly.

An additional set of readings is available online in the Course Documents portion of our Blackboard site. It includes the following articles:

• Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. New York: Harper & Row.
  Chapter 4: The conditions of flow
• Malone, T. W., & Lepper, M. R. (1987). Making learning fun: A taxonomy of intrinsic motivations for learning. In R. E. Snow & M. J. Farr (Eds.). Aptitude, learning and instruction. Volume 3: Conative and affective process analysis. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

In addition to the readings, you'll be making use of Cardboard Cognition, a resource created by previous generations of EDTEC 670 students. Cardboard Cognition is a compendium of dozens of educational card and board game designs.

Grading

Your final grade will be determined by your performance a motivational design intervention for an existing course, the design of an educational board game, an online learning experience (eGame) and your contributions to the group blog.

There will be several possibilities for the final eGame project. These include:

• Taking the board game designed earlier in the course and turning it into an online game using the Vassal Engine.
• Using a new tool named ZigScript to design and develop a role-play simulation that could be conducted either online or face-to-face.
• Developing a place-based puzzle game using mobile devices and puzzles using the SCVNGR platform, or augmented reality using Aurasma.
• Creating a branching simulation in the style of Choose Your Own Adventure using Captivate or PowerPoint.
• Developing your board game design fully and publishing it at The Game Crafter.

Blog contributions will be graded individually. All three design projects will be team efforts. Each individual on the team will be graded separately, though the overall performance of the team will have an influence over individual grades. It behooves you, therefore, to put some energy into team building in order to maximize everyone's success. The projects will be weighted as follows:

This is a graduate level course. Grading performance in an amorphous area like game design is not easy, but not impossible either. Please keep in mind the following definitions of grading standards from the SDSU Graduate Catalog:

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