February 24, 2011

Members from the TARGET-EEU extension responded to the Call for Chapters of the book entitled “Serious Games as Educational, Business, and Research Tools” edited by Maria Manuela Cruz-Cunha. Gregor Cerinsek (University of Ljubeljana), Heiko Duin (BIBA), Manuel Fradinho (SINTEF) and Marco Taisch (POLIMI) provided a the chapter “Serious Gaming Supporting Competence Development in Sustainable Manufacturing”.

Here is the abstract:

Becoming a Sustainable Global Manufacturing enterprise is a challenge for almost each manufacturing organization in the world because of its multidimensional nature. Sustainability combines environmental, economic, and social dimensions and is considered to be a complex and hard to learn subject needing a lot of experience and competences. Traditional ways to create such experience and develop competences like role playing and simulations tend to take a lot of time and are expensive. On the other hand, Serious Gaming has proven to support learners in acquiring new and complex knowledge and is ideally suited to support problem based learning by creating engaging experiences around a contextual problem where users must apply competences to solve these presented challenges. This chapter introduces a new learning environment which is build around a gaming engine supporting the development of competences in specific subject areas. Selected competences in Sustainable Global Manufacturing lead to the definition of scenarios which then can be executed by a game engine, thus creating experience within the user. A knowledge ecology space allows the user to interact and reflect on learning outcomes with other participants. The subject of Sustainable Global Manufacturing is the application case presented in this chapter showing how specific competences in this area have been identified and how a game scenario has been developed. Finally, its implementation and evaluation is discussed.

The book is scheduled to be published by IGI Global for release in 2012.