This paper contributes to the emerging field of serious games in higher education providing teaching-focused academics, interested in engaging in building serious games and other digital artefacts, a comprehensive guide to support rigour in design and development research.Serious games in higher education are emerging as essential pedagogy and increasingly being created as immersive teaching cases. In accounting education, serious games developers tend to focus on the technical problem-solving activities the students are required to undertake, somewhat treating them as traditional case studies with engaging digital features to motivate students and deliver required learning outcomes. Less attention is given to serious games design and development research and the generation of a digital artefact or research vehicle that embodies pedagogically driven components and variables that can be further studied and tested. This latter approach requires a carefully designed research framework and methodological positioning. This paper explores the methodological positioning taken with design and development research of serious games in accounting. This paper has identified the specific methodological approach to the project-based research and used it to guide the design and build of the digital artefacts to support learning pedagogies. While this study is underpinned by constructivist learning theories, the interpretivists/constructivists approach is used as an overarching philosophy to guide the scope of the designs from a student outcome perspective. This also comprises the need to evaluate the cognitive burden and learning experiences from the designed digital technologies.

Authors:
Viktor Arity, The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University, Australia
Gillian Vesty, The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University, Australia
Meredith Tharapos, RMIT University, Australia

About the Presenter(s)
Viktor Arity is currently an associate lecturer in RMIT University. Viktor's research interests include accounting education, serious games and innovative pedagogy.

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