Paper Title: It's all fun and games
Paper Abstract: The Graphic Design department of the Haute École Albert Jacquard in Belgium is officially designated as a “technical” school. As opposed to, for instance, an art school or a university. This entails two consequences. First the teaching style offered at the institution is practice based, project oriented, skills driven and with an emphasis on intuition rather than theory, research or conceptualization. The second consequence is that the type of student we attract, while being quite varied, generally fits the style of teaching offered, having low interest in theory and being mostly eager to acquire practical skills.
In recent years, two pedagogical experiments have been led to try and bridge that practice vs theory gap. One with first year students to try and raise their motivation towards learning Art History, the other with fourth year students, trying to introduce reflexive practices in their, by then strongly ingrained, “skills and intuition” approach. In both cases gamification (or serious gaming) proved an efficient tool to achieve those goals.
