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ISGEE Good-Practice Collection

Introduction to ISGEE

What is ISGEE?

The project “Implementing Serious Games in Entrepreneurship Education” (ISGEE) is a so-called Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership project. The objective of ISGEE is to foster the development of entrepreneurship and digital competences in Higher Education. The consortium behind ISGEE does so by developing a serious game application, titled Entrepoly. Entrepoly is an open access, modularly structured digital serious game with dynamically adjustable content as to match specific educational requirements to individual classroom requirements. In its essence, Entrepoly is a role-playing game (RPG) that consists of different modules and tasks relevant for digitally based entrepreneurial learning in Higher Education Institutions (HEI) classroom environments.

Who works on ISGEE?

The consortium of ISGEE is constituted by the University of Szeged (lead partner), Univations GmbH, West University of Timișoara, Expertissa Timișoara, Technical University of Ostrava, & STUCOM. It is funded by the Erasmus+ programme of the European Commission to increase collaboration between educational institutions in the European Union and to find innovative solutions for joint challenges in education. ISGEE started in September 2018 and will be terminated in September 2021.

Aim of the Project

The aim of the ISGEE project is:

  1. to develop entrepreneurship and digital competences with a digital serious game, called Entrepoly (1), that arrives with
  2. a supporting adaptation handbook,
  3. a teaching toolkit and also
  4. a selected good serious games practices for entrepreneurship education (4).

ISGEE fits DigiCompEdu’s recommendation fostering the following activities:

To create or co-create new digital educational resources: an open access innovative digital serious game (1)

To organize digital content and make it available to learners and educators: game adaptation handbook (2) and gamification teaching toolkit (3) for lecturers

To identify, assess and select digital resources for teaching and learning: a good practice suite for educational implementations (4)

Motivation

Serious games have become an increasingly popular method for transforming educational content into an approachable and fun format. However, this transformation comes with the inherent assumption that players are motivated to learn simply because the content is housed inside a game. While this assumption is grounded in certain realities of today’s digital age, these assumptions are certainly not taking the whole picture into account. Although the interest in serious games in HEIs has seen a spike recently, the games themselves are rarely designed on well-established learning theories as proposed by pedagogical researchers. This, often times, increases the risk of the games failing to meet their intended educational goals, ultimately yielding a player base who is entertained but who have not acquired new skills or knowledge.

We think that a quantitative assessment system of (serious) games will help bridge this imbalance between learning outcomes and entertainment. By assessing and ranking serious games based on best practices, we hope that this will spark the necessary debate on how much serious games actually help in delivering learning outcomes in HEI classroom environments.