Research And Application Of Educational Games For College Public Politics By EDR

As the development of informational technology, the development and application of digital learning resources has become one of important means that initiate the instructional reformation of College public politics. Recently, more and more attention is being paid to video games as a medium for learning as they gather promising features: fun, interactivity, challenge and engaging. Gee, Squire, Barab, Clark, Shaffer and other scholars have discussed "the nature of cognitive and emotional development, literacy practices, and thinking and learning during gameplay in a range of gaming environments and genres". They have tried to understand how players learn and how they construct knowledge through games. Squire points out that one of the main characteristics of this game is "they are based on simulation". He also indicates that games are more than technologies, they function as "possible spaces for us to explore, inhabit, master and eventually package into trajectories of experiences that form the basis of new skills, ideas, and identities". Gredler believes that educational games and simulations are "experiential exercises" and experiential simulation permit students to "execute multidimensional problem-solving strategies as part of a defined role". Up to now, many countries have developed many educational games and the application of game for the teaching of history gradually gains acceptance. Therefore, our project group have designed and developed an educational game for College public politics based on the historical event-Long March which is an important knowledge point in one of the College public politics-"Outline of Chinese Contemporary History". We integrate the learning content of Long March into the plot, scene and task of the game and the values of historical curriculum teaching into the rules. The game is able to construct a virtual historical space where student can explore and interact with the characters, objects and rules as a virtual historical actor, thus understanding the process and significance of Long March, perceiving the spirit of it and obtaining pleasant learning experiences.It is in the light of the theory of EDR (Education Design Research) that our project group has collected students'learning needs by the questionnaire and chosen the game type, then developed and applied the game for three iterations. In the first iteration, we completed the instructional design, overall design, development, application and evaluation of the game, and summed up some design guidelines for historical educational game. After that, we amended the instructional design and overall design of the game, and worked on the second development and application based on the evaluation data of the first iteration. In this iteration, we summed up common features between game design and instructional design, and some design guidelines for historical educational game as well. Finally, according to the evaluation data of the second iteration, we developed the game for the third time. Then, in order to completely understand the application results of the game, we chose 30 samples from all colleges of Huazhong Normal University to play the game and answer our application questionnaire. Through the three iterations of the development and application of the educational game for College public politics, we have gradually improved the game and refined the design principles of historical educational game which forms the guidelines of design, development and application.