Skills: Research, international collaboration, authoring tools, instructional design, game design and development

I was offered the opportunity to collaborate with Dr. Irene Lubbe to create a game to help students understand plagiarism. After numerous brainstorming sessions and iterations, we’ve created our version 1 and utilised it in an experiment. Publication abstract below:

In higher education, digital game-based learning has gained substantial attention as an innovative and engaging approach to enhancing learning experiences. Game-based approaches can be used at all stages of education to provide practical applications and experiential learning instead of focusing solely on theoretical or conceptual learning. This paper explores the effectiveness of using a visual novel as a low-resource tool to promote plagiarism awareness in undergraduates. The voluntary study was broken into two parts: a pre and post-test assessment to  measure the game’s impact on students’ knowledge of plagiarism (n = 66) and a questionnaire with additional qualitative input (n = 104). The results demonstrated a statistically significant increase in test scores, supporting the potential to deliver educational content- in this case, important policies. Furthermore, the qualitative data showed that the participants had a positive experience interacting with the game. Overall, visual novels may be an effective game-based medium for instruction- especially where budgets are limited.

DOI: 10.1109/GEM61861.2024.10585502

The game is playable below in full-screen mode (hit the button in the lower-right corner of the game window).