Open 3D Environments for Competitive and Collaborative Educational Games

Abstract

Educational games have a lot of potential to raise students’ motivation and improve the quality of education when applied properly. But finding a suitable game for a particular learning objective is not easy and development of a new one is expensive. In our university course a group of students developed a prototype of a serious gaming tool for architectural design, which is based on the Google Street View environment. With this tool teams can model 3D buildings, place them in real world images, share their results, and rate them. The solution provides a better contextualization of the model and paves a way towards integration with a full 3D environment, which should even more improve the serious gaming experience in the architectural design.