A Serious Game for Teaching Data Literacy

Abstract

Experiential learning through computer games has been shown to impart a greater level of understanding and increased retention of concepts and relationships than more passive educational pedagogy, enabling students to better transfer lessons learned to the business world. Understanding data, making sense of it, interpreting it, presenting visualizations of it, telling stories with it, and using data to drive decisions are critical skills in today's workforce. In this paper, we present a case study describing the design and development of a serious game for teaching data literacy to undergraduate-level university students. The game is modular and expandable, and it supports accessibility, multiple languages, and the use of different real-world scenarios. We describe the design principles we used, present the resulting data literacy game, and discuss our conclusions and future considerations for serious game design.