University of Texas-Dallas professor gets $250,000 grant to develop game for students

by PegNews wire

RICHARDSON — Suppose for a moment you are a new college student and early one school day you wake to find it pouring rain outside.

“Do you go to class, or do you go back to bed?” That is the first question freshmen — and for that matter most students — ask themselves on a rainy day, UT Dallas School of Management faculty member Dr. Michael J. Savoie says.

Savoie continues the soggy scene: If you do go to class, do you take an umbrella?

“Do you have an umbrella?” he wonders aloud. If not, do you borrow one? From whom? Or do you buy an umbrella? “Do you even know where to buy one?” he asks.

His conjecture is based in reality and rooted in purpose. The reality is that Savoie has seen plenty of soaked-to-the-bone scholars come dripping into his classes on stormy days. His purpose is to teach the bumbershoot-less as well as others bumbling through this scenario to succeed in college.

To that end, Savoie and a design team he has assembled are using a $250,000 grant they recently received to create an interactive online game intended to help acquaint students — and their parents — with campus life.

“We want to develop a game adaptable for new students at any of the UT campuses to help them acclimate to the culture of campus,” says Savoie, who is director of the School of Management’s Center for Information Technology and Management.

A University of Texas System program initiative, Transforming Undergraduate Education, is investing a total of $2.5 million in Savoie’s proposal and 10 others — including two more from UT Dallas. Awarded on a competitive basis, the grants are going toward a variety of technologies and creative approaches. The goal is to generate teaching materials that will increase student access to and success in higher education while simultaneously either reducing instructional costs or increasing cost efficiency.

Eventually, Savoie envisions, his team’s game will prove useful to students at all levels in their college careers. The game is scheduled to roll out in fall 2010. But his first foray, he says, will target freshmen, transfer students, and their parents -- and the game initially will focus on time- and money-management issues.

The as-yet-unnamed game will convey what pretty photos and well-intentioned “About Us” pages on university Web sites simply cannot, Savoie says. The game conveys a sense of a campus and its environs, how they work and how a student, through the choices he or she makes, can adapt to fit in and feel comfortable.

In essence, the game will be built to capture what Savoie calls the “three-dimensional aspects” of campus life. Beyond coping with academics, this may include living away from home, working, and handling their own finances — all for the first time.

Savoie is making the virtual world his classroom because, he says, “we want to reach students through a platform they understand, and gaming has been shown to be almost universally understood and used by people age 25 and younger.”

With avatars — virtual characters that are their online alter-egos — game players “will have to go to class, eat, wash their clothes,” Savoie says, in essence “live” the equivalent of a campus existence. While individual objectives might be quickly achieved, the game will remain playable on an ongoing basis, with components that will change. “There will be randomness in the game,” Savoie says, “because that’s the real world; life is random.”

“Whether monetary, time-management, or social interaction, the game will show [players] the consequences of the decisions they make,” Savoie says, allowing them to safely practice choosing among alternatives and gain from the experiences in a short time.

Savoie says what adults might get from the game will be a clearer understanding of what their children are likely to encounter. For example, he says, mom and dad may recognize that that their child will need to do his own laundry, but they may not know the closest washeteria is eight blocks from the laundry-less apartment complex where Junior — who won’t have a car — plans to reside.

Ideally, the game will leave students and adults alike with more realistic and fewer fantasy expectations about the college experience, Savoie says. Particularly for international and minority students, who traditionally have had a harder time acclimating, this will provide a valuable service, he says.

If students learn from the game’s scenarios and their related choices, UT campuses will benefit by seeing higher student-retention rates and more satisfied students, Savoie says. Those, in turn, will enhance the UT reputation, keeping the system’s appeal strong among future generations.

Savoie’s team plans to test its prototypes among two groups: minority nursing students enrolled at UT Arlington and international students attending UT Dallas.

Although the goal for the game has serious educational purpose, Savoie says, “I want it to be fun. I want kids to play the game because it is fun.”

Source: UTD