Students as producers: Designing games to teach social science research methods and ethics

In this paper we explore our experiences of a staff-student collaborative project that sought to design games and learning resources that could be used to 'liven-up' research methods and ethics teaching in the social sciences. Final and second year undergraduate social science students were encouraged to reflect on their own experiences of both research methods teaching and the process of doing primary research, in order to design games resources that would be useful for future cohorts of students. The concept of games was applied twofold in the project: the development of the teaching resources was itself set up in a games format: we based our initial workshops on the style of the BBC's "Apprentice" programme in order to come up with ideas for the games resources and to introduce a competitive element into the design process. Two groups of students were given a brief to design a games resource that would 'liven up' social science research methods and ethics teaching. Groups then spent an intensive day working on the brief alongside an academic facilitator before pitching their final game concept in a presentation at the end of the day when a winner was announced. In subsequent workshops students worked collaboratively to further develop both games before piloting them on further groups of students prior to production. The second application of the games concept lay in the development of an actual learning resource to be used in future research methods and ethics teaching. The premise of developing an undergraduate dissertation, its (realistic) design and the potential ethical and methodological problems encountered when doing research underpinned the learning objectives for the games developed. The developed games resources have been introduced into the curriculum to supplement the existing (more traditional) learning and teaching strategies and to add a 'fun' element into research methods teaching. Developing a game-based learning approach themselves has thereby increased students' influence on the design of teaching and learning strategies and helped produce a useful learning resource for future cohorts. The paper highlights the benefits of staff-student collaboration in the design and production of game resources, and in particular, the potential for harnessing students' experiences of teaching and learning through feeding it into curriculum development. The paper also demonstrates the benefits of gamification - through a discussion of the positive student feedback and evaluation received by the developed games.