Abstract
College freshmen often face difficulties adjusting to the new academic and social environment of university life. It is critical to help them adapt to academic and personal life, while also improving their sense of belonging and engagement with the university. In this paper, we focus on the context of an international joint venture university, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (XJTLU), and present a participatory design approach to identify potential solutions collaboratively. We conducted three participatory design workshops with freshmen in undergraduate and postgraduate studies, where we discovered specific challenges, developed serious game content and design alternatives, and delivered a board game that supports academic and social integration at XJTLU. To evaluate the effectiveness of the board game, we collected both quantitative and qualitative data. The quantitative analysis revealed that the board game is effective in improving freshmen’s knowledge acquisition of academic affairs, increasing their familiarity with the environment and resources, and enhancing their ability to access information and resources. The board game also received high scores in system usability and user experience. The qualitative analysis indicated that the board game was engaging, interesting, and well-received by students. They found the board game helpful in their academic and social integration and expressed a desire to play it again in the future. Our participatory design approach and the resulting board game provide a promising avenue for universities to support freshmen’s transition to university life.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
Workshop questions:
Q1: Generally, how do you feel about your academic and social life at XJTLU?
Q2: Did you encounter any issues when adapting to the campus environment (DG1), academic affairs (DG2), and social life (DG3)? Can you give some examples?
Q3: Are there any happy moments that you can think of at XJTLU? Can you give some examples (DG3)?
Q4: Where do you seek information about the university? How do you use university resources (DG4)?
- 2.
References
Belay Ababu, G., Belete Yigzaw, A., Dinku Besene, Y., Getinet Alemu, W., et al.: Prevalence of adjustment problem and its predictors among first-year undergraduate students in Ethiopian university: a cross-sectional institution based study. Psychiat. J. 2018 (2018)
Brooke, J.: Sus: a “quick and dirty’ usability. Usabil. Eva. Ind. 189(3), 189–194 (1996)
Chang, W.L., Shao, Y.C.: Co-creating user journey map-a systematic approach to exploring users’ day-to-day experience in participatory design workshops. In: Kurosu, M., Hashizume, A. (eds.) International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, pp. 3–17. Springer, Heidelberg (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35596-7_1
Council, B.D.: The double diamond: 15 years on (2019). https://www.designcouncil.org.uk/our-resources/archive/articles/double-diamond-15-years
Credé, M., Niehorster, S.: Adjustment to college as measured by the student adaptation to college questionnaire: a quantitative review of its structure and relationships with correlates and consequences. Educ. Psychol. Rev. 24, 133–165 (2012)
Danielsson, K., Wiberg, C.: Participatory design of learning media: designing educational computer games with and for teenagers. Interact. Technol. Smart Educ. 3(4), 275–291 (2006)
De Freitas, S.: Are games effective learning tools? a review of educational games. J. Educ. Technol. Soc. 21(2), 74–84 (2018)
Duarte, A.M.B., Brendel, N., Degbelo, A., Kray, C.: Participatory design and participatory research: an HCI case study with young forced migrants. ACM Trans. Comput.-Human Interact. (TOCHI) 25(1), 1–39 (2018)
Freeman, T.M., Anderman, L.H., Jensen, J.M.: Sense of belonging in college freshmen at the classroom and campus levels. J. Exp. Educ. 75(3), 203–220 (2007)
Khaled, R., Vasalou, A.: Bridging serious games and participatory design. Int. J. Child-Comput. Interact. 2(2), 93–100 (2014)
Kiili, K., De Freitas, S., Arnab, S., Lainema, T.: The design principles for flow experience in educational games. Procedia Comput. Sci. 15, 78–91 (2012)
Kuhn, S., Muller, M.J.: Participatory design. Commun. ACM 36(6), 24–29 (1993)
Luck, R.: Learning to talk to users in participatory design situations. Des. Stud. 28(3), 217–242 (2007)
Lukosch, H., van Ruijven, T., Verbraeck, A.: The participatory design of a simulation training game. In: Proceedings of the 2012 Winter Simulation Conference (WSC), pp. 1–11 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1109/WSC.2012.6465218
Lupton, D.: Digital health now and in the future: findings from a participatory design stakeholder workshop. Dig. Health 3, 2055207617740018 (2017)
Marshall, S., Zhou, M., Gervan, T., Wiebe, S.: Sense of belonging and first-year academic literacy. Can. J. High. Educ. 43(3), 116–142 (2012)
Mazzone, E., Read, J.C., Beale, R.: Design with and for disaffected teenagers. In: Proceedings of the 5th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: Building Bridges, NordiCHI 2008, pp. 290–297. Association for Computing Machinery, New York (2008). https://doi.org/10.1145/1463160.1463192
Midgley, C., Middleton, M.J., Gheen, M.H., Kumar, R.: Stage-environment fit revisited: a goal theory approach to examining school transitions. In: Goals, Goal Structures, and Patterns of Adaptive Learning, pp. 109–142 (2002)
Morgan, D.L., Krueger, R.A., King, J.A.: The Focus Group Guidebook. Sage, Thousands Oaks (1998)
Nazry, N.N.M., Romano, D.M.: Mood and learning in navigation-based serious games. Comput. Hum. Behav. 73, 596–604 (2017)
Pittman, L.D., Richmond, A.: University belonging, friendship quality, and psychological adjustment during the transition to college. J. Exp. Educ. 76(4), 343–362 (2008)
Scariot, C.A., Heemann, A., Padovani, S.: Understanding the collaborative-participatory design. Work 41(Supplement 1), 2701–2705 (2012)
Schrepp, M., Hinderks, A., Thomaschewski, J.: Applying the user experience questionnaire (UEQ) in different evaluation scenarios. In: Marcus, A. (ed.) DUXU 2014. LNCS, vol. 8517, pp. 383–392. Springer, Cham (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07668-3_37
Scott, H., Donovan, E.: Student adaptation to college survey: the role of self-compassion in college adjustment. Psi Chi J. Psychol. Res. 26(2), 101–112 (2021)
Spinuzzi, C.: The methodology of participatory design. Techn. Commun. 52(2), 163–174 (2005)
Susi, T., Johannesson, M., Backlund, P.: Serious Games: An Overview. Technical report, Institutionen för kommunikation och information (2007)
Tabibian, B., Upadhyay, U., De, A., Zarezade, A., Schölkopf, B., Gomez-Rodriguez, M.: Enhancing human learning via spaced repetition optimization. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 116(10), 3988–3993 (2019)
Tan, J.L., Goh, D.H.L., Ang, R.P., Huan, V.S.: Child-centered interaction in the design of a game for social skills intervention. Comput. Entertain. (CIE) 9(1), 1–17 (2011)
Tinto, V.: Leaving College: Rethinking the Causes and Cures of Student Attrition. University of Chicago press, Chicago (2012)
Wouters, P., Van der Spek, E.D., Van Oostendorp, H.: Current practices in serious game research: a review from a learning outcomes perspective. In: Games-Based Learning Advancements for Multi-Sensory Human Computer Interfaces: Techniques and Effective Practices, pp. 232–250 (2009)
Ye, L., Zhou, X., Yang, S., Hang, Y.: Serious game design and learning effect verification supporting traditional pattern learning. Interact. Learn. Environ. 1–15 (2022)
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank our participants for their time and valuable comments. This work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (62207022), Natural Science Foundation of the Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions of China (22KJB520038), and the Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (RDF-20-02-47).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Li, Y., Li, Y., Liang, J., Liang, HN. (2023). Easy Induction: A Serious Game Using Participatory Design. In: da Silva, H.P., Cipresso, P. (eds) Computer-Human Interaction Research and Applications. CHIRA 2023. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1997. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49368-3_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-49368-3_12
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-49367-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-49368-3
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)