Troubles articulating questions for the Serious Game Design final exam

I am having some trouble articulating a particular question (or family of questions) for Serious Game Design final exam. When having trouble thinking about something, it helps to write about it, so here goes.

Regular readers may recall that I am teaching a Serious Game Design course as an Honors Colloquium this semester. My students are prototyping educational games as part of a larger immersive learning project with Minnetrista, a local cultural center and museum. Over the summer, I wrote about a structural change in the course: my hope was that by investing more time into readings and activities early in the semester, my students would create better prototypes by the end of the semester. We spent from August 24 through October 5 engaged in a series of readings and exercises, which you can read about on the course schedule if you wish. October 12 through 24 was spent on a series of concept documents and project pitches as students figured out what kind of game they wanted to create, and then October 26 through November 30 was spent on production. Next week, they present their projects to our community partner, and after that, it's finals week.

During the production period, students gave a series of in-class status reports, during which they had to comment upon what design challenge they were working on, what kind of evaluation they conducted, what evidence they gathered, and what conclusions they drew from this. These requirements were not treated rigorously, neither by my assessments nor by the students; I see this now in retrospect, that I would wager students couldn't even tell you what the status reports were supposed to be about. I will need to consider more rigorous assessment of this in the future perhaps.

Be that as it may, I noticed about two weeks into these status reports that up to that point, students had made no reference to any activity from the first half of the course. What triggered this observation was when a student explicitly tied their game to a visitor classification taxonomy that our partner shared with them. In particular, she acknowledged that her game was for the "rechargers" who came to Minnetrista's grounds to mentally, emotionally, or spiritually recharge. Her observation caused me to reflect on how no one else had done this, and then by extension, that no one had framed their work within any of the formal or theoretic models we had studied. Going back even to their various concept documents, there is no mention of the work from the first half of the semester. Crucially to this discussion, it was not required to do so. I mentioned the lack of explicit theoretic grounding to them this past week, when we had a minute or two before class was dismissed, as something that had been on my mind. They nodded in acknowledgement but their minds were clearly on their way to their next obligation.

The fundamental question I have is Why? It's a question I have for myself, but it's a question I want them to wrestle with. I took my first pass at articulating this as the last part of their final exam, which I was working on this morning:

Consider the discussions we have been having in class during the pitch and production period (October 17 through November 30) along with the essays you have written above. My notes suggest that during the second half of the semester, there were essentially zero student-generated references to the theories we studied in the first half of the class. Write an essay addressing the question, Why is that? To address this, you might consider corresponding questions such as Could it have been otherwise? or What are the relative merits of personal opinion vs. theory?, although there are certainly other directions one could take a thoughtful discussion.

The prompt above is the result of considerable revision, but I am still not entirely happy with it. As I explained it to my wife over lunch, there's another side to it that perhaps is even more difficult. Given that the students did not justify their designs using the theories we studied, and that they did not reference these theories in the feedback they gave each other, I have to ask the question: if they had not spent the first half of the semester grounding themselves in theory, would they have still made the same product at the end? There's another, potentially less charitable way to put it: did they actually learn anything during that first half of the semester?

There's a sense in which these are research questions: I could, in theory, teach a pair of courses that are structurally identical except for the entire first half, and see if the resulting games—and discussion around those games—shows any qualitative difference.  That would be interesting, but I lack the resources to pull off such a thing. A related study would be to take two courses that are structural identical except that in one of them, I require students to contextualize their work in theory, for example in each status report.

Those questions are more about me and my scholarly interests: I see the inherent problem for the final exam as being something that students should grapple with. What does it mean for them that they did not reference any of the theories we discussed? Do they believe they learned? Maybe more pointedly, did they not ground their work in theory on purpose or on accident? That is, were they lazy by choice or did they not even consider the idea that those earlier concepts should be referenced? And if the latter then, by extension, we're back to: Why?

Collecting my thoughts here hasn't exactly cleared up the issue in my mind, but at least I have my thoughts all in one place for future reference. Once we get through the final presentations next week, I will have some time to more carefully consider the matter and come back to the questions on the final exam.

A footnote of sorts: One may think, "Aren't you concerned that you are writing your final exam questions online in public prior to them being assigned?" The truth is, if any of my students are following my writings on games in learning, I think they are far enough ahead of the game that it wouldn't matter, since they'd have seen this question coming a mile away!

If you have any suggestions on how to frame the question, feel free to share them in the comments. Thanks for reading!