Integrating HCI and SoTL Through Video Game Research Methods
This dissertation integrated two research traditions that rarely talk to each other: Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). The bridge between them turned out to be video games, and the methods developed for formally analyzing how they work.
A course has players, environments, rules, sequences, and ways of measuring performance. So does a game. Analyzing a course with the tools developed for game analysis opens up conversations about course design that don’t get stuck on content and assessment.
The Five-Dimensional Framework
Player, Performance, Narrative, Environment, and System
The Five-Dimensional Framework
The framework has five dimensions for thinking about course design.
- Player asks who’s participating, what agency they have, and what they’re trying to do.
- Performance is about the actions people take and how the course tracks and responds to them.
- Narrative covers the sequencing of content and the story that sequence tells.
- Environment is where learning happens, both digitally and physically.
- System covers the institutional rules and structures that shape what’s possible.
Two tensions run across all five: agency vs. structure, and active vs. passive participation. The interesting design problems tend to live at those tension points.
Explore the Work
The TL;DR summary is a quick overview with practical applications. Key figures collects the framework diagrams and other visuals. There are recordings of conference talks and seminars, a complete bibliography, and the full PDF is available on UCalgary’s PRISM Institutional Repository.
Map of the dissertation as a game environment
About This Work
Author: D’Arcy Norman, PhD
Institution: University of Calgary
Program: Computational Media Design
Supervisors: Patrick Finn, Ehud Sharlin
Year: 2023
Preferred Citation
Norman, D. (2023). The teaching game: integrating HCI and SoTL by adapting video game research methods (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/1880/115879
Abstract
This dissertation proposes and systematically explores the potential for integrating the distinct but overlapping disciplines of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). This work of integration is approached through a series of research projects from different perspectives, demonstrating the potential for adapting concepts from the design and formal analysis of video games to enrich the study of course designs and of understanding the varied experiences of instructors and students. Video games provide a useful point of integration between HCI and SoTL, specifically through concepts and principles employed in the design of video games, and through the adaptation of research methods that have been developed to enable formal analysis of video games.
It is our hope that integrating HCI and SoTL helps to address limitations in each discipline—to move HCI away from technical evaluation within contrived or laboratory contexts, and to move SoTL toward more deeply understanding the roles of technology, design, and performance.