Games as a form of education

In an effort to promote the importance of communication among team members, the university has adjusted a design course into a game. It is a novel approach to teaching and allows students to interact whenever, wherever as long as they have a computer.

The course material, however, is the student's first design based class that sets the majority of the framework for understanding why they are taking all of their prerequisite math, physics, chemistry, thermodynamics, and more advanced topics. Those topics alone can require intense effort to the exclusion of practical background material in the coursework. Without either background, the learning process can become plug and chug short term memory event. Years later, when all of the prerequisite learning is completed and people are given the task to solve a real problem from scratch, the associations necessary to break the problem down into workable steps have deteriorated if they were there at all. What good are the teamwork and communication skills when there is nothing to communicate?

While this is more an issue of an overall lack of background than the result of an online transition, it is important to note that for teamwork and design based problems, online interaction is not ideal. People only communicate when they think it is relevant, and many cues are missed during the communication - especially one's confidence in the work. When working at the same location, people are more likely see the process leading up to another's communication. During these times people can catch errors early as well as branch their own idea off a middle step and not simply an end organized communication.