Learning about Europe through educational gaming

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the contribution to geography teaching which can be made by serious games. We describe the ways in which gaming has progressed from “dissected maps” and jigsaws through board games, to the range of online games which are available today. We describe the development, in conjunction with European partner institutions, of a new game, entitled RU EU?, intended to raise student awareness of European issues, notably the question of European identity; this seems to be both important and topical at the time of Brexit. We describe the development and the nature of the game and its launch, and the feedback which we have received from students who have played it, and suggest that, while it is not necessarily a substitute for traditional lecture-style teaching, games such as this can provide an additional tool in the geography lecturer’s armoury.

KEYWORDS:

• Serious games
• board games
• online gaming
• Europe
• identity

Acknowledgments

The work reported in this paper was part of the ‘RU EU? A game-based approach to exploring twenty-first-century European Identity and Values’ project. This project is partially supported by a KA203 Erasmus+ Strategic Partnerships for Higher Education grant (Grant Agreement no: 2017-1-UK01-KA203-036601) and is a collaboration between the University of the West of Scotland, the Open University of the Netherlands, Tehničko veleučilište u Zagrebu (Croatia), the University of Peloponnese (Greece) and Bremer Institut für Produktion und Logistik Gmbh (Germany).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the KA203 Erasmus+ Strategic Partnerships for Higher Education grant [Grant Agreement no: 2017-1-UK01-KA203-036601].