Based On The Teaching Design Of The Quest Atlantis Gaming Unit Design And Development

Instructional Design is one of the major courses of undergraduates majoring in Educational Technology. It is in the center of the curriculum system, playing a powerful role throughout the learning processes. However, the course "Instructional Design" didn’t provide students with a predictable application context and an actual working environment. That is, there exist contextualized teaching problems. As a practical course, it is necessary to utilize Brown’s Situational Learning Theory and Dewey’s viewpoint of Learning from Experiences in the course "Instructional Design", so as to construct a real-world instructional design context where students could carry out interrelated practices, which is helpful of fostering students’authentic instructional design capability. As for constructing real-world instructional design context, educational online game is an effectively alternative technical proposal.Chapter One, the introduction part of the thesis introduced background, contents and significances of the research. Research status in China and abroad of design, development and implement of Quest Atlantis’(QA’for short) game units are also reviewed in this part. Furthermore, educational online game often has a long design and development circle, with a high cost and not easy to modify. According to the features mentioned above, I utilized the principle of Phased Check and Limit of Faults(check and limit the faults in the nearest place of its generation) and the Model of Iterative Waterfall, which are from software engineering, to conduct the integrated planning of the whole research.Chapter Two firstly differentiated two groups of definitions, one included educational game, online game and educational online game; and the other was consisted of Quest, Mission and Unit. And then, classification of educational online game from content infrastructure perspective was discussed. There was also a brief introduction of Learning Engagement Theory and Conceptual Play Spaces Theory. In addition, this part focused on analyzing the major theoretical principles of the article——Transformational Play Theory from two aspects of historical origin and core.Chapter Three and Four are the main parts of the article. Chapter Three described the five stages of designing Instructional Design——the3D game unit which was dedicated to solve contextualized teaching problems. These five stages were game oriented practice from teacher’s perspective, consulting game oriented design plan with non-target population, modification of the plan, evaluation of the plan and fixing the final game oriented design plan.Introduction of Active Worlds (which was the development environment of the game unit) and its key technology was put up in Chapter Four. The differences between Active Worlds and the other popular3D virtual environment——Second Life were also examined. The whole development process was elaborated in order to offer reference.The conclusions and enlightenments from the design practice are as follows:First, Transformational Play Theory was re-contextualized when it was put into practice in the research; Second, iterative participatory design was used in the stage of designing educational online educational game. Development showed that it was feasible to put up the scene in Active Worlds for providing students with a real-world context about instructional design, where students could carry out interrelated practices. And then, skills and methods used in the development process were summed up at last.The innovative points of the research are as follows:On one hand, exploratory study was worked for designing and developing3d game units. On the other hand, a new way of contextualized teaching for instructional design course was issued. However, there were some weaknesses in the study, such as lack of communication with the frontline teachers, insufficient elaboration of the game plan, only qualitative evaluation in the design stage, incomplete development of the game unit and also without validation. Continuous improvement is hoped in the future research.