Browsing by Subject "digitaalinen nuorisotyö"

This study’s purpose was examine the needs for game educators training material for a game education company named School of Gaming. Game education is still rather new field of education. While game education has been studied the study of professional game education is lacking. This master’s thesis was carried out as a design-based research that produced a game educators training material for School of Gaming. Design-based research encompasses problem analyses whose focus is to examine both the theoretical as well as empirical needs of the design product. The theoretic problem analysis for this study came to be from the studies of extracurricular programmes’ instructors and their behavior’s correlation to the participants’ positive youth development. There seems to be a common finding in this field of study that the close relational distance between instructors and participants is in positive correlation with the positive youth development. Don Hellison’s Teaching Personal and Social Responsibility model acts as the theoretic framework for this design-based research. The model is originally created in the context of physical education but it can be also applied in the field of game education. The model defines the underlining values and principles that affects physical education as well as stages of development for the skill of personal and social responsibility. The empirical need for the game educators training material was studied by interviewing active game educators from School of Gaming. The interviewees were picked from those who had been trained through the first version of the training material, were actively working as game educators in School of Gaming and had started working within six months by the time of the interview. Total of nine game educators were interviewed. The interview was carried out as half-structerd theme interview. The questions of the interview were divided in three themes: the strengths of the training material’s first version, the weaknesses of the whole game educator training and the possible future reform of the training material. Deducting from the problem analyses the training material went through a reform. The language as well as structure were systematised, the contents dividing were changed to make the whole material more understandable and better suit the need of the training. A new sections about the importance of seeing children and youth as individuals, facing of difficult situations in game education as well as the importance and practicalities of communicating with children’s or youth’s homes. The training material was made to be used by School of Gaming.