Designing an Alternate Reality Educational Game That Integrates Virtual Reality and Storyline to Learn About the History and Culture of a Local Town

Abstract

Local cities in Taiwan actively emphasize the preservation of town cultural assets and the creation of distinctive cultural attractions. In this study, we designed an alternate reality educational game, taking the love story of the town of Puzi in Taiwan 70 years ago as the theme, and connecting several representative cultural attractions. The learning objective is for the learner to take an old man who has returned to his hometown from a faraway place to search for the places he remembered in this town 70 years ago and collect clues in each place to complete the old man's mission to find his girlfriend when he was young. The game uses Google Form for storytelling and allows learners to control the story by selecting different options. Learners need to actually walk to the places of interest in order to unlock the puzzles presented in the VR (Virtual Reality) surroundings. Players can deepen their understanding of the cultural sites through observation in the actual site, peer discussion, and online research, and final decision-making to solve the puzzles. The preliminary study was conducted with 23 participants from Taiwan, ranging from 12 years old to 50 years old adults. The results of the study showed that the participants' mean scores for flow, anxiety, game elements, and game feedback were all significantly higher than the median of the scale (i.e., 3). The research results preliminarily show that the mechanism designed in this study is easy to operate and will not cause learning anxiety.

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Author Information
Chih-Chung Chien, Graduate Institute of Applied Science and Technology – National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taiwan
Pei-Ching Ngu, Graduate Institute of Applied Science and Technology – National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taiwan
Chih-Chen Kuo, Graduate Institute of Applied Science and Technology – National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taiwan
Hau-An Yu, Graduate Institute of Applied Science and Technology – National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taiwan
Huei-Tse Hou, Graduate Institute of Applied Science and Technology – National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taiwan

• Category: Implementation & Assessment of Innovative Technologies in Education

Posted by James Alexander Gordon

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