Collaborative learning by means of Multiplayer Serious Games

Abstract

The field of collaborative learning has been researched for many years with a focus on evaluation of the circumstances under which collaborative learning provides better learning effectiveness compared to individual learning. Traditional collaborative learning has been taking place as group work or discussions in a class. Recently, Serious Games for learning and Digital Educational Games (DEGs) have been established as a promising alternative to the traditional one-to-many teaching as it is still standard in today's classrooms and with the uprising technology of Multiplayer Online Games (MOGs), new ways of collaborative learning are possible. In this paper we examine various chances and challenges for collaborative learning which arise by the use of Multiplayer Serious Games. Section 1 motivates this work, followed by a description of some important aspects of MOGs and collaboration in Section 2. In Section 3 the concept of collaborative learning is explained and important concepts and methods for a collaborative game design are analyzed and discussed in Section 4, using some examples of collaborative Serious Games. Finally, we briefly introduce our own approach of a collaborative Serious MOG in Section 5. In Section 6 the results are summarized and further work is pointed out. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.