I ended up as an academic but this week I am happy to announce my newest paper as a first author in JMIR Publications Serious Games on a learning game I created together with the ETH Game Technology Center, University of Zurich, and Medical University of Vienna with support from Quintessence Publishing Deutschland. Our Game AR Osteoclasts ( https://lnkd.in/eWFpi8av ) invites the player to experience the process bone resorption on the surface of a bone and learn about the constituent processes in a playful manner. We investigate how complex scientific processes can be presented to students as games and help them to expand their visual understanding.

A special thanks goes to Julia Chatain for her input on the study design to capture student learning. Also to Violaine Fayolle (now at Disney Research Zurich ) for the great work on the Game UI. This project wouldn’t have been possible without Bernd Stadlinger and Fabio Zünd.

So what can you learn from our work?
✅ Games motivate students and make the learned more important
✅ Games help curious students to engage better with the learning material than written information
✅ Gaming style impacts which part of the game can be explored and needs to be aligned with learning goals
✅ Translating science into game mechanisms impacts which aspects of the scientific process are highlighted and consequently learned. Students who played the game talked most about the main actors and actions of the game.

Stay tuned for a second part where we investigate the differences between AR and VR-based learning!