At the University of Hamburg, integrating new media into educational settings is a central aspect of teacher education. The introduction of Serious Game programming to teacher education supports pre-service teachers as they familiarise themselves with creative ways of utilising the educational potential of new media, for themselves as well as their students.

1. From the field
Introducing Serious Game Programming to
Teacher Education at Hamburg University
Author At the University of Hamburg, integrating new media into educational settings is a cen-
tral aspect of teacher education. The introduction of Serious Game programming to
Silke Günther, Fakultät für
Erziehungswissenschaft, teacher education supports pre-service teachers as they familiarise themselves with
Psychologie und creative ways of utilising the educational potential of new media, for themselves as
Bewegungswissenschaft well as their students.
Universität Hamburg
silke.guenther@uni-
hamburg.de Hamburg University, one of the largest universities in Germany, accepts about 900 pre-ser-
vice teachers per year. During their course of studies, they can choose to focus on courses in
educational science aimed at deepening their knowledge about integrating new media into
Tags
educational settings.
Pre-service Teacher
In this article, we describe a course for pre-service teachers designed to get them into touch
Education, Serious Games
with creating games for educational purposes while offering them various possibilities of
having experiences with the benefits and the possible pitfalls of new media usage in educa-
tion in general.
In the second half of 2011, twenty-seven students attended the course as a part of their regu-
lar coursework required for a master’s degree in teaching. Most of these students had never
programmed before and were introduced to programming by using the iconic programming
tools Alice 2.0 and Scratch. Three participants had been taught at school how to program in
Delphi and were encouraged to make use of their skills. The central task of the course was to
create a Serious Game that should either relate to the students’ subjects or to a pedagogical
field they had already worked in, e.g. youth work. The game was to be supplemented by the
structure for a lesson or an activity based on the educational possibilities of the game. A pre-
requisite for conducting the course was the availability of a mobile notebook center, about
one third of the students used their own notebooks.
Mostly working in groups, the students familiarized themselves with the programming tools
after drawing pictures of what the final ten games should look like. In addition, they were
introduced to the ideas behind using Serious Games in educational settings (Gee, 2007) as
well as basic concepts for developing and evaluating software in general, e.g. usability and
playability (Genvo 2008). While programming their games, the students came across a num-
ber of problems (Jenkins, 2002), which can be sorted into three major categories.
Some obstacles came up, when the students tried to grasp basic programming concepts like
loops or if instructions. To solve these problems, the students required little assistance and
usually used a try-and-error approach, which was supported by the possibility of getting im-
mediate feedback by playing the current version of the respective game. A lot of students
were successful in grasping more advanced concepts like the usage of variables. A second
kind of problems involved integrating visuals and audio into the games. Some students were
not familiar with image editing freeware like GIMP or had never used free recording software
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2. From the field
like Audacity. Thus, the course contributed to increasing their needed a visual structure and it was necessary to define how to
familiarity with software they can rely on when working on new present information, e.g. answer clues, to the learner. Besides,
media projects with their future students. the level of difficulty had to be adjusted to the intended play-
ers and motivating the players became important. After testing
Another difficulty was the didactic design of the games. The
their games with the intended gamers twice, the students could
students had to make a lot of choices not only typical of design-
adjust their programs and handed in their final versions at the
ing games for learning, but also reflecting the difficulties of de-
end of the semester.
signing analogue learning material, e.g. worksheets. The games
Figure 1 shows a hidden-object game
created to motivate junior students to
acquire and practice an understanding
of basic French. The game was pro-
grammed in Alice 2.0. and embeds the
search for hidden objects in a crime
story, mainly told in French.
The math game shown in Figure 2 main-
ly relies on motivating by giving visual
feedback. After choosing a number
range, the players get to solve a num-
ber of randomly created equations. The
game was programmed in Delphi.
The course was an initial attempt at in-
troducing Serious Game programming
to teacher education at Hamburg Uni-
versity. The results showed that pro-
gramming Serious Games offers a lot
of possibility for supporting pre-service
Figure 1: Hidden-Object Game for learning basic French – example of verbal motivation teachers in acquiring the skills neces-
sary for integrating new
media in educational set-
tings.
Figure 2: Game for training basic arithmetic operations within variable number ranges – example of
visual motivation
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3. From the field
References
Gee, J. P. (2007). What Video Games Have to Teach Us about
Learning and Literacy, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Genvo, S. (2008). Understanding Digital Playability. In Perron, B.
& Wolf, M.J. (Eds.): The Video Game Theory Reader 2, New York:
Routledge, 133-149.
Jenkins, T. (2002). On the Difficulty of Learning to Program,
retrieved August 10, 2012 from http://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/~steve/
localed/jenkins.html.
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