Shared learning objectives in interdisciplinary projects: Game design in a Sino-Scandinavian context

摘要

The learning goals of project-based courses are typically specific for each involved discipline. Game development is deeply interdisciplinary and some of its core principles are shared across disciplines, from art to programming. This article presents a project-based approach where students majoring in arts and students majoring in technology share learning objectives. The course has been developed in a Sino-Scandinavian collaboration. Experiences from well-established Scandinavian game development programmes have been transferred to a Chinese university context. This article presents an explorative mixed method evaluation of this course. The research design had two phases with an initial qualitative analysis resulting in a set of observations that were tested in the second, quantitative phase. A total of 34 students from a range of disciplines participated in a two week course. The quantitative analysis shows that art (n=13) and technology (n=14) students' reported very similar experiences and similar insights into core learning objectives. This study shows that deeply interdisciplinary project-based courses, with shared learning objectives can successfully be conducted even in a context with no prior experience of such approaches.