Serious games can be a powerful tool for addressing complex topics; an INESC TEC researcher led a workshop covering all stages of the development of a serious game for global health and wellbeing.
What connects canine rabies, the use of fertilisers in agriculture, the Zika virus, anxiety, and vaccines? The answer is a serious games workshop – and INESC TEC. INESC TEC researcher Maria Van Zeller travelled to Munich, Germany, as part of the European EUGLOH project, to teach a five-day course dedicated to the development of serious games applied to global health and wellbeing.
From digital escape rooms to board games, augmented reality, and creative adaptations of classics like Monopoly, the initiative brought together more than 20 students. The outcome was a set of games that, beyond their playful component, fostered multidisciplinary discussion around complex real-world challenges.
Maria Van Zeller brings extensive experience in serious games projects, notably as the coordinator of Project Trio, developed by INESC TEC. The project served as a laboratory for the creation of a platform focused on health, digital, and data literacy, and it also provided the starting point for the five-day programme held in Munich at Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU), at the invitation of EUGLOH, a European university alliance that promotes the concept of global health and wellbeing.
“Even before the workshop, through an online training session, students were instructed to form groups, work on a topic, and bring a project idea – what we call a tree map – so they could start thinking about the problem they wanted to address,” explained the researcher.
The remainder of the work took place in Munich: students from diverse cultural and academic backgrounds (e.g., Biology, Medicine, and Psychology) adopted design thinking methodologies and went through all stages of serious game development: problem understanding, ideation, prototyping, usability testing, and a final pitch presentation, “as if they were on a show like Shark Tank”.
The winning game was designed to raise awareness of the importance of vaccination against canine rabies among high school students. Progress in the game depended on correctly answering true-or-false questions, and the game could be played in either a physical or digital environment.
According to Maria Van Zeller, the experience reinforced the importance of serious games as educational tools and demonstrated the potential of co-creation and interdisciplinary work in promoting health literacy at a European level.
“In all the games, it was crucial to understand the learning outcomes and educational objectives. The main goal was not so much the degree of completion of the work – although, in this case, it was fully completed – but rather ensuring that participants acquired all the learning concepts effectively,” she noted.
The event welcomed five groups, including students from the University of Porto. In addition to Maria Van Zeller, INESC TEC researcher António Coelho was also present in Munich. He leads the Pedagogical Innovation Living Lab, responsible for promoting this course in liaison with LMU, the University of Porto and the University of Szeged (Hungary).
The researchers mentioned in this news piece are associated with INESC TEC and the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto
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