Serious Play
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      • Learning Physics Concepts Through Digital Game Play
      • Minecraft for Design Learning
      • ​Statecraft X: Citizenship Education on a Mobile Phone
      • The Language Learning Space: A Virtual Space of Chinese Language Games
      • The Minecraft Challenge
      • Who Wants to be a Millionaire?
      • Xbox Kinect: Girls and Games
      • Local Area History Building
      • Play Station in Year 2
      • Myst With Year 7: All About Teamwork
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Serious Play Project Overview

Young Australians’ everyday lives are increasingly digital. Their lives are characterised by digital play and online interaction. The knowledge, skills, and dispositions developed in digital culture enable them to effectively and actively participate in society. The introduction of computer games into the classroom has been one way explored by educators to meet the challenges of young people’s digital culture in 21st century schooling. For the most part, however, computer games developed for educational purposes have been designed and introduced with little attention to the nuances of how teachers teach or students learn through digital games. This project aimed to improve understandings about the use of digital games in the school.  It focused on teachers and learners, and on literacy, learning and teaching with digital games in Australian classrooms.

This project explored what happened to literacy and learning, curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment when digital games were introduced into the learning environment. It investigated the ways in which young people’s out of school experience of games and games-based learning could be used to support literacy, creativity and disciplinary learning through the use of both commercial and ‘educational’ (serious) games. Working with primary and secondary schools across government and private sectors in the Australian states of Queensland and Victoria, the project focused on these six areas:
  1. the ways in which students with widely differing preferences and experiences with digital games and digital culture approached games-based teaching in the classroom;
  2. the ways in which the experience of game-play changed in classroom contexts;
  3. the ways teachers worked with digital games most effectively, and the kinds of pedagogical practices and approaches that best capitalised on the capacities of games to teach;
  4. the opportunity games provided for creativity, production, and innovation; and
  5. digital literacies and the ways in which learning through games challenged and extended multimodal literacy learning.

Industry Partners
Australian Research Council
Griffith University
Deakin University
Queensland University of Technology
Nanyang Technological University
Department of Education and Early Childhood Development (Victoria)
6 Queensland Schools 
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