Name
Abstract | ||
|---|---|---|
While physical study abroad and exchange programs are proven methods for building cross-cultural communication, there are many limitations on the number of people who get to participate and how accessible such programs are to diverse populations. To address such inequities of access and consider virtual alternatives and supplements to traditional study abroad programs, a team of faculty and students collaborated on making a game designed to facilitate both English-language learning and cross-cultural communication through providing a virtual version of a trip to the United States. This paper discusses the historical context enabling such a project to occur and then discusses the process of building and deploying a game designed by US students for a Russian audience of visually-impaired students at the Grot School in St. Petersburg, Russia. The resulting text- and audio-based game demonstrates the potential of situated user-centered game design as a pedagogical practice with learning outcomes both for the student creators and the audience of student players. The resulting game was requested by 11 other institutions. The results reported here highlight the ability of game based learning to facilitate cross cultural communication, develop mutual understandings, and build relationships between culturally diverse students on an interpersonal level. It further reveals how the use of open source game creating tools provide a customizable game platform for the development of ideas to improve intercultural competence in the context of language learning (such as EFL) when other resources are not readily available. The impact of this type of initiative is thus far greater than the created object (the game): it illustrates the strong potential of games and game-making as a method for advancing cultural discourse, an important prerequisite for effective intercultural communication and documentation. |
Year | DOI | Venue |
|---|---|---|
2016 | 10.1145/2987592.2987600 | SIGDOC |
Field | DocType | Citations |
Intercultural communication,Interpersonal communication,Study abroad,Computer science,Game design document,Knowledge management,Game design,Intercultural competence,Human–computer interaction,Game Developer,Multimedia,Cross-cultural communication | Conference | 0 |
PageRank | References | Authors |
0.34 | 5 | 4 |
Name | Order | Citations | PageRank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Alla Kourova | 1 | 0 | 0.34 |
| Anastasia Salter | 2 | 0 | 1.69 |
| Irina Pidberejna | 3 | 0 | 0.34 |
| Rudy McDaniel | 4 | 47 | 9.24 |