The "Water Cooler" game

Much has been written about the theoretical potential of digital games to transform teaching and learning and to offer new forms of digital assessment; yet the education system in the United Kingdom (UK) is arguably still focused exclusively on the assessment and reward of individual effort and achievement. This can be at odds with the requirements of twenty-first century working environments and in the requirements for developing the personal employability characteristics of students. Engaging students in authentic collaborative project work that requires sophisticated and coordinated communication can present real challenges. Employers are demanding, as prerequisite, that graduates have highly developed communication and collaborative team working skills for opportunities in the digital industries such as Games Design, however Games Design students are often quite isolated in their personal industry related practice, working methods and their online lifestyles and lack the “soft skills” which would enable them to work successfully within a team. In this paper, the authors elaborate on how Hull School of Art and Design has attempted to address this problem through the implementation of an Applied Game, the “Watercooler Game”, for their Games Industry undergraduates. They present their reflections on the rationale behind the pedagogic approach, the decision to develop an applied game to address their pedagogic challenges and their experience of working with a commercial Games Developer in producing the game. The authors present the initial findings of their evaluation of game from a multidimensional perspective. The pedagogic approach (using applied games with a selected small cohort of students), the technical approach adopted by the developers of the game (an open source asset based approach) and the pedagogic efficacy of the game through evaluation of the learning objectives achieved by a cohort of seventy learners situated in the College’s School of Art and Design.