Abstract
Aim
- This departmental-level project produces an interactive and sustainable game platform for advancing the teaching of tourism planning and management.
Brief Project Description
- This project develops a scenario game based on environment settings (e.g., Amazon forests or historical city) or spatial scales (e.g., regions, cities or local sites) that are either real cases or hypothetical areas.
- Different geographical settings offer different attributes, conditions and problems for tourism destination development. These aspects are the topics/themes of tourism study, e.g., tourism impact assessment, destination planning and visitor management.
- The game allows individual or group of students to conduct role play and make decisions in situations of storyline through a self-administered, e-learning and user-friendly platform.
- Techers are both lecturers to deliver conceptual/theoretical knowledge at certain stage of the game and facilitators to interactive class discussions.
- Teachers can study the learning experience/game playing behavior of individual students/groups with different backgrounds for teaching evaluation, improvement and research purposes.
Significance
- This project is of high relevance to teaching enhancement and it will be constructive when the game is utilized continuously and across tourism courses.
- The project integrates lecturing, class interactions and e-learning application.
- The project allows long-term utility of the outcome (game platforms) in a number of tourism, geography and natural resource management courses, of both Geography and Resource Management major and general education classes. The portable version may integrate with some existing or developing on-the-spot field trip learning APPs/softwares. There is an opportunity for further departmental or faculty-level collaborations in the next stage of development.
Brief write-up
Project objectives
This project develops two scenario games for tourism education in two different environmental settings (indigenous community in Amazon rainforest for ecotourism and hypothetical city for urban tourism). The games incorporate areas of knowledge, e.g., tourism impacts, destination planning and visitor management, and allow groups of students to conduct role play and make decisions in scenarios of the storyline through the eLearning and user-friendly platform.
Activities, process and outcomes
The ecotourism scenario game was applied in four courses, including a General Education course in two academic years and two Geography and Resource Management major courses from 2017 to 2019. Through a series of game and discussion sessions for CUHK undergraduate students, the team also studied the learning experience of the participants for research purposes.
The project outcomes are positive. The games provide a more interactive way of teaching-learning process between instructor and students, and among groups of students. Student satisfaction is confirmed in pre and post surveys on knowledge, attitude and usability dimensions of the games.
Deliverables and evaluation
All the key performance indicators are well achieved in terms of game-based learning in courses, student positive evaluation, and accomplishment of project objectives, University Themes, institutional strategic plan and priorities/goals.
Dissemination, diffusion, impact and sharing of good practices
This project and its deliverables were shared as good teaching-learning practices across 5 academic conferences, 2 teaching and learning expos, 3 papers submitted to academic journals, and sharing of the game platforms to other academic and teaching fellows over the project period.
