Project Abstract

Serious games have become increasingly popular in education, thanks to techniques likegamification, simulations, and scenario-based learning that have improved student engagement. However, despite these advances, soft skills have remained a peripheral achievement in schools. To address this gap, I plan to design a 2.5D serious game, “Tag Team” in Unity, that will be used to teach and assess teamwork, collaboration, and cooperation among undergraduate students in the UK. This game will undergo incremental development, focusing on completing each level at a time. I conducted an empirical literature review on recent work within the past half-decade that used serious games to teach soft skills, with most studies leaning towards making serious games fun to improve student engagement. There is clear evidence of the need for soft skills for career success and progression. This experiment’s research questions and hypotheses will be subject to testing fun, collaboration, and supervision. This study is set towards a mixed-method approach through open-ended questionnaires and semi-structured interviews. Upon completion of this experiment, the findings will be of utmost importance to fellow researchers on the nontrivial matter of the need for soft skills in existing pedagogy. They are also encouraged to replicate the same experiment in different contexts beyond the one constricted to this study. Employers, tutors, students, and education institutions will get to use a novel, serious game that strikes a balance between fun and purpose.Keywords: Soft Skills, Gamification, Serious Games, Higher Education pedagogy, HumanComputer Interaction (HCI).

Keywords: Serious Games Gamification, Higher Education pedagogy, Soft Skills

 Conference Details

Session: Presentation Stream 15 at Presentation Slot 7

Location: GH029 at Wednesday 8th 09:00 – 12:30

Markers: Anton Setzer, George Brooks (GTA)

Course: MSc Computer Science, Masters PG

Future Plans: I’m looking for work