Crypto Island

Finally, I am getting around to mentioning my virtual world project 2015-16. I am yet to create a final user report for this, but it will appear in second life along with all the others at this slurl. The project was named  Crypto Island see fig 1

fig 1

and it gave me the chance to try out the use of \serious games as a tool for learning. And so instead the game is a medium through which one learns, presents the opportunity to consider the more intrinsically rewarding benefits of serious games, in essence that the game should not only be fun but produce emotional, behavioural and cognitive engagement, in a combination that is key to success (Iten., N.  & Petko, D. (2014). Learning with serious games: is fun playing the game a predictor of learning success? British Journal of Educational Technology doi:10.1 1 1 1/bjet.12226).

fig 2

The scenario placed my students back in Britain of 1942 see fig 2,

where they were tasked with decrypting enemy messages, this of course meant they first had to learn about encryption techniques. The game element I introduced was for them to decipher the codes before damage from nightly air-raids see fig 3, 4 reached a predetermined value. In the event that the target value was exceeded, then the encryption would become correspondingly more difficult.

fig 3

fig 4

Students start by learning the fundamentals of encryption based situated in an old factory learning space, see fig 5.

fig 5

Where materials are presented on notecard dispenser boards in a low resource demanding format. The emphasis at this phase is for collaborative problem solving, making successive attempts at testing and evaluating their learning using in-world online cryptographic engines. Submission uses notecards that are returned using covert drop points, in this case public letter boxes. Once the practice sessions are complete, actual messages are delivered through telephones placed at various locations around the sim; in order to retrieve message students would have to wait for a telephone call (ring), at which point they simply touch on the telephone to receive a notecard; a particular feature I felt had the further effect of encouraging exploration and collaboration. Once the cyphers have been decoded, they are once again recorded on notecards and returned using the drop point network. When all messages have been correctly deciphered, air strikes will cease, effectively ending the game.