Centre for Multimedia and Learning Information Design

Game-based learning has been recognized as an important alternative or supplement to traditional in-class, face-to-face teaching. It can help both adults and children in learning new concepts, acquiring expertise and practicing knowledge. Although game-based learning has been applied mainly for teaching children, it can be quite helpful for adult vocational or university learning. In this paper, a web-based game is presented, which has been developed for enhancing the learning experience of university students. Its goal is to serve as a complement to classes, although it can be used independently. It provides the students with many ways for communicating (synchronously or asynchronously) and acquiring information. Through the use of the game, the students gain easily new knowledge, since they have to search for it, understand it and use it in discussions with other students, who are members of other teams. The game is played by many users simultaneously. Microsoft’s ASP.NET scripting environment was used for creating the game’s website. The website utilizes also Macromedia’s communication technology (Flash Communication Server MX) for enabling real-time communication by several means (voice, text, etc). Flash was used in the website for building the real-time communication modules as well as for creating a more elegant user interface. The game platform can be used by many teachers simultaneously for running different game themes. It also gives the opportunity to visitors to watch games as spectators