Serious Games For Reflective Learning

This paper describes a game application designed for care homes, hospitals and the civil protection and dealing with the topic “complex dialogues” in the frame of the MIRROR project. This project aims to empower and engage employees to reflect on past work performances and personal learning experiences in order to learn in “real-time” and to creatively solve pressing problems immediately. The designed game will be the first step to analyse how to motivate adult users to learn with games and specifically to foster individual as well as group reflection, self consciousness of users and to foster cooperation with a virtual or real tutor on a personal level as well as within a group of learners. During the game described in this paper the users will have the possibility to experience scenes of daily life at work and choose between different behaviors. Whenever they feel it is relevant, they can record their moods through a so-called “mood map”, based on the “Circumplex model of affect” (Russell J.A., 1980). This allows to capture data useful to understand the emotional impact of the serious game and of the covered topics and reflect on them. At the end of the game the users can self-evaluate their behavior based on a set of predefined parameters, and only after receiving a feedback coming from the system, they will see the discrepancy between their self-perception and how they actually behaved. Finally, in order to foster reflection, users will be able to review the choices made during the interaction with the serious game seeing in addition the reactions and thoughts of their counterparts. Preliminary results of users expectations and experiences are reported and an outlook on further steps is given.