DESIGN TALES: PROMOTING AND ASSESSING INTERACTIVE AND PLAYFUL LEARNING

DESIGN TALES: PROMOTING AND ASSESSING INTERACTIVE AND PLAYFUL LEARNING J. Postell, A. Sironi Politecnico di Milano (ITALY) Abstract This paper describes the teaching and learning pedagogy in a History of Design and Interfaces course and focuses on the final exam project, which embraced interactive gaming techniques to promote and assess group learning, as well as foster creative and critical thinking skills in the first-year Interaction Design students. A final and collective project (the design of a board-and-card game to promote interactive learning of design history) was conceived by students and named Design Tales. It intentionally replaced the traditional oral or written final exam for the course. It gave students an opportunity to utilize individual and collective knowledge gained in the course and served as a metric for valorising learning in a creative and innovative manner. Points of view obtained from questionnaires and surveys from those who participated in the course along with the final output of work are presented and discussed in the paper. According to some authors, board-gaming represents a kind of oasis from the constant overlapping and compression of information typical of our daily experience mediated by digital technologies. This concept is helpful in setting the pedagogy, organization, goals and objectives, learning outcomes and final output from the course. The structure of the course included: lectures, readings, discussion, group work, individual work, in-class presentations and an interactive final project. Student output from the course was regularly evaluated and feedback shared. The final exam was designed to promote and valorise all learning metrics in the course. Instead of introducing only game elements into a traditional educational context (known as gamification), playful learning was promoted through individual and group research that led to creative and critical thinking about the history of design. The final exam for the course was re-conceived as an opportunity for students to create an interaction-based project that incorporated all their learning and gave an opportunity to apply and experience interaction design concepts. The students utilized these concepts in the form of a card game to learn about the history of Design and interfaces called Design Tales. In this paper, the authors focus on how students conceived and developed a game, and how it was designed to promote individual and group learning, as well as foster creative and critical thinking skills. Feedback from the students stated the exam was an opportunity to utilize knowledge gained in other courses in the first year and served as a means of fostering important aspects of socialization and critical thinking skills. Student feedback verified that the final exam was a positive learning experience and positioned first-year students at the forefront of their education in Interaction Design utilizing interface, participation, broad learning methods, feedback, discussion, and designed output as important metrics. Innovation was not only in the approach of rethinking traditional paradigms in teaching and learning, but also in the approach to rethinking the role, delivery and metrics of a final exam in a History of Design and Interfaces course. Keywords: Innovative Learning and Teaching, Game-based Learning, Gamification, Interaction Design, First year.