Acquiring 21st century skills: Gaining insight into the design and applicability of a serious game with 4C-Id

Abstract

Despite the growth of interest in serious games, there is little systematic guidance on how to assure a game fits the instruction required. Game design frameworks are still under development and do not help to articulate the educational merits of a game to a teacher nor fit with their background. In this paper we discuss the results of a GaLA workshop which examined how a widely applied instructional design model, 4C-ID, can ease the uptake of serious games by offering teachers a model fitting their background to assess games on the applicability for their learning contexts. The paper will introduce the 4C-ID model and its use in the CHERMUG project with the design of mini-games for research methods and statistics. Next, we will discuss how workshop participants used the 4C-ID model to evaluate two games on their applicability for a given learning context. The participants indicated that the approach can support teachers in deciding if and how to use a given serious game.