Day 2: Session 3: Presentation 2
🗓️ Wednesday 21 May 2025 🕙 10:00-11:00
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Theme: Exploring innovative course design and assessment strategies for digital environments
Near Future Teaching: A Framework for Creativity in Game-based Science Education
Monica Tolocica
Recording
✍️ Activity
Imagine that you are a student or a digital learning designer invited to contribute creative ideas or scenarios to this Miro board.
The Miro board showcases some of the original Virtual Reality scenarios developed by the fantastic Virtual Reality Student Experience (ViRSE) students, in collaboration with the ViRSE academic and software development leadership team at Imperial College London.
Your aim is to use your expertise and creativity to enrich these scenarios and playful digital experiences by embedding certain dimensions of complexity, where possible – uncertainty, emotions & empathy and a world-based perspective.
Thank you for your contribution to this valuable ongoing project. Stay in touch!
Abstract
Imagine that you are an engineering student navigating a Virtual Reality (VR) educational scenario. Your mission is to develop an intuition for the visualisation of beams and trusses, the building blocks for bridges or plane wings. The game gently guides you through activities involving beam profile analysis and appropriate selection of pin and roller supports for various loads applied.
Now imagine you are in the body of an architect and your mission is to build a resilient bridge. You are competing with your peers and inspiring each other, while simultaneously learning about beams and trusses. Trial and failure, emotional connections with your creations and with the world these belong in are an intrinsic part of your game experience.
My presentation draws upon similar scenarios from my recent MSc dissertation research project, which explores student-generated educational design potentialities in VR science-based playful experiences under the complexity lens. I propose a Futures co-participatory methodology – Near Future Teaching (Bayne & Gallagher, 2021) – a generative research framework for imaginative game design educational explorations facilitating the emergence of more engaging, enriching and open-ended educational potentialities.
In this presentation, I will briefly outline my research study context and rationale, showing how I adapted my research design to uncover previously unexplored educational game-based potentialities within my institutional context. A key focus will be interactive and playful engagement – immersing the audience in a VR science-based scenario from my study to collaboratively explore out-of-the-box game-based educational design potentialities. The audience will not only get a first-hand experience of the versatile research design framework I have used; they will also critically reflect on the generative power of their creative ideas which could prove pedagogically transformative for students participating in such playful experiences.
References
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