The use of computer games as a learning tool in landscape architecture education: LANDCONS 1.0

The main purpose of this research is to present an educational video game that assists students to develop essential knowledge and skills for a landscape designer through solving the instructional game-based problems in a virtual environment. Thus, undergraduate landscape architecture students will be able to learn these topics in an active way through analyzing the problems, solving the problems, observing the effects of their decisions, and creating a network among these information. Moreover, this research aims to develop a distance learning tool for providing a time and space independent education opportunity for disabled or geographically-dispersed students. The technical infrastructure of the video game will be able to serve towards the distance learning policy and activities of Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK) (2016) and İTÜ UZEM (2016). The recent computer-aided education and distance learning tools are serving as a click-and-learn interface that allow instructors to share the audial and visual educational material. However the recent computer technologies promises more educational potential and opportunities. This research points out to the serious games approach that refers to the use of video games and gaming technologies for beneficial main purposes rather than entertainment. Serious games have been used widely in military, medical and corporation for teaching and training of specific practices or developing expertise on certain tasks. When the recent serious games were analyzed according to the pedagogical potentials, these noteworthy characteristics and benefits emerge: • They confront students with the well-designed learning tasks, which aim to require students to produce or optimize solution alternatives for specific knowledge and skills, • These tasks are designed to explain a case-specific problem or situation and require application of a solution, which are gradually getting difficultier to prepare students for harder problems, • They provide the essential information and guidance for students as informative and supportive feedbacks to assist them to solve these problems, • They improve the motivation by embedding the gamification and game mechanics into the learning process, • They are designed to engage students for solving complex problems in collaboration with other students and leveraging learning motivation by employing the social learning and team working. Many research and experimental studies remain that prove the improvement of learning rate through the employment of the indicated benefits at above (Barab et al, 2005; Dade et al, 2004; Rowe et al, 2009). The main purpose of this research is developing a visual-based and collaborative video game that assists students to take an active role in learning for engaging and leveraging the learning of landscape grading topic. This research focuses on developing a virtual learning environment through the use of existing free and open-source gaming technologies that allows students to learn the landscape grading and construction topics by achieving the learning tasks in the virtual environment. Moreover, this research can be used for providing educational service for computer-aided-education and distance learning tool for the students who are deprived of education. This research is formed in five phases: • A learning scenario and a series of learning tasks were created according to the curriculum of landscape construction and grading topic, • Instructive graphics and three dimensional models were prepared for facilitating the learning of complex systems and applications, • A virtual environment was set up in a server computer with Internet connection by installing the OpenSimulator software (2016), • The serious game was built on a virtual environment platform to create tasks for responding each learning outcomes by importing the visuals and other assets and programming the objects for creating the interactions among the students, objects, visuals and environment. • A series of experimental studies were conducted in order to evaluate the educational and motivational effects of this serious game. In conclusion, a serious game was developed by employing/exploiting the recent computer and gaming technologies for creating a student-centered, visual-based, and interactive learning tool for engaging and leveraging the learning of landscape construction and grading topics. Moreover, the educational and motivational effects of this serious game were evaluated by gathering findings and data from the experimental studies to measure the development of knowledge and skills of the students. This research presents a precedent application for computer-aided education and distance learning applications in various disciplines. Moreover, the area of usage of this project can be expanded by employing the mobile devices such as tablet computers and smart phones.