Lessons learnt from contextualized interactive story driven development methodology

Abstract

The advances in innovative responsive educational and training delivery platforms has not cease, with serious games taking centre stage in new crop of solutions promising to deliver reduced time-to-competence of employees at anytime and anywhere. Irrespective of the technical and pedaogical merit of such solutions, the challenge remains the same, how to develop the required content that is grounded in the relevant learning domains (eg: project management) and provide effective learning experiences at good value. This paper presents the Contextualized Interactive Story Driven Development (CISD 2) methodology to develop content for serious games aimed at providing situated contexts for the development of competences, relying on the contributions of a multidisciplinary team. The framework has two distinct strands, one focuses on the contextualization of situated contexts, whilst the other focuses on the desired competences to acquire and their model, leading to the observed behaviours that may be measured and calculated as performance of the desired competences. Both strands have four distinct layers, starting at conceptual level and finishing with the actual story implementation that provides the effective transformation of learners according to the intended learning outcomes and that such transformation can be measured. When progressing through the layers, CISD 2 recognizes the need of making decisions to reduce the scope and avoid feature creep. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.