The Teaching Game

Integrating HCI and SoTL Through Video Game Research Methods

Think of a course like a video game: it has goals, rules, players, and an environment where learning happens. This research explores how borrowing methods from video game analysis can help us better understand, design, and improve teaching and learning in higher education.

What This Research Offers

This dissertation develops a framework for course designers and educational developers that integrates two complementary research traditions:

• Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) - understanding how people interact with technology
• Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) - researching and improving educational practices

By adapting concepts from video game design and analysis, the framework provides:

• A holistic lens for designing courses beyond content and assessment
• Methods to visualize and analyze course structures
• Tools to identify successful patterns and potential problems in course design
• New ways to understand technology’s role in teaching and learning

Explore the Work

The Five-Dimensional Framework

The core contribution is a framework with five interconnected dimensions for understanding and designing courses:

1. Player - Who are the participants? What roles, agency, and goals do they have?
2. Performance - What actions do people take? How is progress tracked and feedback provided?
3. Narrative - What’s the story? How does content sequence create engagement?
4. Environment - Where does learning happen? What digital and physical spaces are used?
5. System - What are the rules? What institutional structures enable or constrain?

These dimensions interact through two key tensions: agency vs. structure, and active vs. passive participation.

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.

The dissertation is organized into three parts. Part 1 introduces the reader to the dissertation, situates it within existing scholarship, and describes the research methods that will be utilized. Part 2 presents the findings of a series of research projects that explore aspects of HCI/SoTL integration. Part 3 synthesizes these findings into a novel framework that has the potential to extend our ability to design and describe teaching and learning, and to add meaningful context to research into the design of and interactions with technology.