Storytelling and gamification as tools for teaching information literacy

Abstract

Welcome onboard. Your research vessel is waiting for you at the harbor. Your destination: Antarctica. Your goal: Save the world. Along the way you will encounter perilous waters and daring tasks. Sharpen your source criticism and find the right answers before it’s too late. This is Kylmä keikka - the Antarctic challenge.

Kylmä keikka edugame is developed in ESR project Poluttamo – Adaptable learning Paths. Our goal was to test how storytelling and gamification works in teaching information literacy. The focus of the learning content is in the source criticism and recognizing facts from fake news. Story connecting to climate change suited our purposes due to its controversial nature. The game was developed for the vocational school students, but it has also been tested in the higher education level.

At the current state, the game is still developing. It has been developed by using free tools and platforms. This allowed us to test the story and the game ideas. We are hoping that the game could be developed further for example adding more visual content to it and to make it truly an online multiplayer game. We believe that by bringing in the more advanced interactive aspect to the game, where players could communicate with each other and with the content or assignments online, it would improve the educational outcome. At he moment the game is available only in Finnish. An English version is estimated to be published in Spring 2020.