UTD professor develops game to retain, integrate
September 23, 2009 -

By Stewart James
sjames@bizpress.net

A University of Texas at Dallas professor is developing an interactive game that will integrate new and transferring students into college life while at the same time increasing student retention rates.

“Just because you get the student to campus does not mean they are going to stay for four years and graduate with a degree,” said Michael J. Savoie, director of e-business initiatives and center for information technology and management at UT Dallas School of Management. “That is really the issue. If you don’t have the retention then obviously, from a school’s standpoint, we are losing our customers and we are losing our revenue stream.”

Savoie and a design team are using a $250,000 grant to create an interactive online game. A University of Texas System program initiative, Transforming Undergraduate Education, is investing a total of $2.5 million combined in Savoie’s proposal and 10 others.

“It became fairly apparent that there are issues that were greater than just making grades in a college classroom,” Savoie said. “There is stuff that affects whether a student stays on campus, how comfortable they are with the environment and how comfortable they are with the community. We looked at that and what we proposed was the development of a game that would address those specific issues.”

The game will be developed to capture what Savoie refers to as “three-dimensional aspects” of campus life. Beyond coping with academics, these, for many students, may include living away from home, working a job and handling their own finances — all for the first time.

“Whether monetary, time-management or social interaction, the game will show [players] the consequences of the decisions they make,” Savoie said. “Allowing them to safely practice choosing among alternatives and gain from the experiences in a short time.”

If students learn from the game’s scenarios and their related choices, UT campuses will benefit by seeing higher student-retention rates and more satisfied students, Savoie said. Those, in turn, will enhance the UT reputation, keeping the system’s appeal strong among future generations, he said.

The idea for the game resulted from three to four years of researching ways in which young adult interacts with technology.

“We have the convergence of two different tracks,” Savoie said. “The track that addresses how businesses can utilize game platforms for training, education and various skill-set learning within the business community. The other one addresses how females interact with technology.”

Savoie said the gaming platform can be utilized for a number of functions that a game might not thought to be used. Part of the reason for developing the game was to target groups of individuals on campus and for parents to understand how college life has evolved.

“If you have a student, for instance, that is a first time college attendee – no one in their family has ever attended college before – they really don’t have a support group to fall back on,” he said. “You have international students that are coming to this country, so they are not only dealing with the academic issues but they are also dealing with the cultural issues.”

Savoie’s team plans to test its prototypes among two groups: minority nursing students enrolled at the University of Texas at Arlington and international students attending UT Dallas.

Eventually, Savoie envisions, his team’s game, scheduled to roll out in fall 2010, will prove useful to students at all levels in their college careers.
Although the goal for the game has serious educational purpose, Savoie wants it to be fun.

The way the game is designed, there is a couple of places you would be able to get it. The first place is you would be able to go to the Web site of the campus that you are looking at.

Savoie and his team also are looking at making the game available on Facebook and mobile phones.

“The idea here, if we do it correctly, is to create a tool that students can use while on campus so it is not just a one time play the game and move on,” Savoie said.

When playing the game, players will have to go to class, eat and wash their clothes, he said.

“While individual objectives might be quickly achieved, the game will remain playable on an ongoing basis, with components that will change at random,” Savoie said. “There will be randomness in the game, because that’s the real world - life is random.”

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