Gameplay as medium: investigating the educational efficacy of game design in HCI education

Abstract

Our first-semester HCI course for CS bachelor students at TU Wien discusses different perspectives on understanding and solving problems in CS. Many students do not see the relevance of these topics in regard to their studies in contrast to the perceived “hard skill” courses such as programming or mathematics. Designing game-based learning methods, we aspire to spawn interest and motivation in our students to engage with these topics that are central to technology design and ideally informed by HCI paradigms. Tapping into our master-level course on gameful design, we tasked students to create games for the first-year HCI course. We conclude that our approach was successful, with the first-year students appreciating the games. In this paper, we describe this design/learning pipeline and our results, concentrating on opportunities to enhance this process, theorise on how to shift more focus on the learning in our game-based learning approach, and reflect on what worked well and possible obstacles in this type of design research.