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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Towards a playful approach to learning collaboration

subject

description

This thesis looks into whether soft skills and group comprehension can be af- fected by playing a game designed for this purpose. If students can gain group work experience by playing. We developed a game for this purpose. With this game we could freely choose which elements we want to draw from reality. Games are often a limited and simplified version of reality. Limited in this context means that we have picked out some of the most important aspects of group work. This let players experience these elements during a short game round in contrast to everyday life, where a group work often takes days, or weeks. Initially, we hypothesized that among students there are many with little knowledge about how important it is to manage working in groups. This is because, especially during the corona shutdown, there were many students who did not work in, or form groups, even after encouragement from the lec- turers. Not forming groups, especially at the beginning of a course can have consequences, like social implications, and losing out on gaining group work experience. It is certainly a problem that should be solved as soon as possible. Thus, we created a solution which we then tested. The results show that it is the case that students do have a grasp of soft skills and group comprehension. By using the game students get introduced to four of the five stages in Tuck- man’s Five-Stage Theory of Group Development. (Tuckman, 1965) where they can gain additional valuable experience without risk.