At the end of primary school, students in the Netherlands do not always reach the levels set by the Dutch government in terms of conversation skills. One of the Master-students I supervised at the Open Universiteit, R. de Wit, tackled this problem and designed a VR barrier game to train conversation skills in Dutch special education.
In a traditional barrier game, students are separated by a physical barrier and have to describe objects to each other. In the created digital version of such a barrier game, students jointly organize an exhibition and have to discuss where to hang images. Each player has incomplete information, so they have to describe the objects to each other. The game was evaluated positively and students actively exchanged information with each other. A joint scientific article describing the results is in preparation.
Read a new post on the website of the Open Universiteit (in Dutch). More information about the game is available here (in Dutch).
Header image: R. de Wit/Taaldeur