Experiencing university through playing property

Abstract

Junior high school students are encouraged to explore their preferences as learners and engage in a range of activities to develop understanding of work, careers and post-school destinations. Higher education providers contribute to the school students’ exploration through proving campus experience programmes structured to aspire young learners and increase enrolments. This paper communicates the design science research method activities of demonstration and evaluation as they are applied to a serious game, Playing Property. Playing Property is an audience response game forming the basis of a workshop to engage junior high students and enhance their knowledge of property investment. The evaluation discusses trends in audience response decisions along with brief survey responses from 12 workshops, conducted over 3 years. The workshops were consistently rated positively by the participating students, with a majority indicating they learned more about property [investment] through playing. Comparatively the results were in line with other hands-on workshop activities facilitated by academic leaders from other disciplines. The resource allocation to the Playing Property workshop is notably less than comparable workshops and the ability capture decision-making data provides a sound basis for further analysis.

Keywords:

• Property education
• serious games
• audience response
• university experience
• school engagement