Effects of a game-facilitated curriculum on technical knowledge and skill development

Abstract

Education in the European Union is one of the key factors to safeguard our competitiveness in the globalising economy. Based upon the Knowledge Triangle, the EU and its member states are working on improving the quality of education, the connection with research for transfer of new knowledge and the connection with industry to bring innovations. Within this paradigm, there are a lot of initiatives targeted towards higher and professional education to work on new teaching methods that implement the knowledge triangle better, especially for learning about complex systems and complex questions in society. From an economic point of view, however, the base of craftsmanship in society is key to keep up our productivity and ability to produce new and more advanced products, in times where most simple production activities get outsourced to developing countries. Vocational education is therefore arguably equally or even more important than higher and professional education. Unfortunately, vocational education is not yet functioning optimally. Our work represented in this paper aims to contribute to improve the outcomes of vocational education by exploring the use of gaming simulation that is already successful in other forms of education. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.