Providing Instruction and Practice through Game-Based Technology

State-of-art, game-based training environments are representative of real world situations and tasks, and they provide highly motivating practice in a form that is inexpensive and portable. However, practice by itself is not an efficient way to learn. Instruction, guidance, and feedback should accompany the practice experience for effective game-based training. The goal of game-based instruction (GBI) is to integrate evidence-based instructional design into serious games, “bringing the classroom into training games.” Our research identified a significant disconnect between the instructional design and game design and development processes, which is a key barrier to the realization of effective instruction in serious games. We propose to create two, complementary sets of tools (GUIDE and GUIDR) for integrating the products of instructional design into the game development process. The GBI Unified Instructional Design/Development Editor (GUIDE) is a collaboration tool for enabling instructional designers and game designers to translate between, compare, and combine instructional design products with game-design products. GBI Unified Instructional Development Runtimes (GUIDR)are software plugins that augment a game-programmer’s existing toolkit with new capabilities targeted at assessing a student’s level of skill, tracking student progress, and delivering feedback and guidance. In Phase II of the GBI effort, we plan to create prototypes of GUIDE and GUIDR and apply the tools in two very different training domains: culture-specific communication and tactical leadership.