Design of Serious Games

About

The Digital Learning Games international Master programme is providing a one­-week course in designing serious games.

Serious games are games that are designed for a serious purpose and not only for entertainment. This serious purpose can be related to defence, education, science, health care, emergency management, urban planning, engineering, religion, politics, and so on. Digital Learning Games is a multidisciplinary programme that combines game design, interaction design and instructional design. Its objective is to bring together experts with different backgrounds (art, ICT, pedagogy, psychology) and design and develop serious and learning games in heterogeneous teams.

Course topics:

1. The nature of serious games
2. Examples of serious and learning games
3. Game design process and roles
4. Finding an idea and defining the goal for the serious game
5. Gameplay: challenges and actions
6. Game core mechanics: objects and conditions
7. Design of game assets. Game world, characters, story
8. Game development environments
9. Game development in eAdventure

Course leader

Digital Learning Games master’s programme teachers and students.

The course leader Associate Professor Martin Sillaots is teaching Game Design, Computer Graphic and Research Methods in Tallinn University. He is a partner of serious games projects like: SELEAG, siLang, EcoHouse, Change Management and member of Network of Serious Games – SEGAN. He is a co-founder of the Gamrilla game startup.

Target group

The course is for teachers, educational technologists, designers, developers, story writers, graphical designers and all others who are interested in designing serious games. Our goal is to form heterogeneous teams of students with different backgrounds.

Course aim

During this intensive summer course, participants will learn the essentials of designing serious and learning games. Students with different backgrounds from all over the world will form teams and design new serious games from ideas to working prototypes. The environment used for prototyping does not require programming skills.

Fee info

Accommodation and meals are not included in the price