Abstract

Aim

• This departmental-level project produces an interactive and sustainable game platform for advancing the teaching of tourism planning and management.

Brief Project Description

• This project develops a scenario game based on environment settings (e.g., Amazon forests or historical city) or spatial scales (e.g., regions, cities or local sites) that are either real cases or hypothetical areas.
• Different geographical settings offer different attributes, conditions and problems for tourism destination development. These aspects are the topics/themes of tourism study, e.g., tourism impact assessment, destination planning and visitor management.
• The game allows individual or group of students to conduct role play and make decisions in situations of storyline through a self-administered, e-learning and user-friendly platform.
• Techers are both lecturers to deliver conceptual/theoretical knowledge at certain stage of the game and facilitators to interactive class discussions.
• Teachers can study the learning experience/game playing behavior of individual students/groups with different backgrounds for teaching evaluation, improvement and research purposes.

Significance

• This project is of high relevance to teaching enhancement and it will be constructive when the game is utilized continuously and across tourism courses.
• The project integrates lecturing, class interactions and e-learning application.
• The project allows long-term utility of the outcome (game platforms) in a number of tourism, geography and natural resource management courses, of both Geography and Resource Management major and general education classes. The portable version may integrate with some existing or developing on-the-spot field trip learning APPs/softwares. There is an opportunity for further departmental or faculty-level collaborations in the next stage of development.