Gamebrics: Integrating Analytical Rubrics into Serious Games to Teach Analytical Skills

Complex skills, such as analytical thinking, are essential in the rapidly changing society of the 21st century. An ongoing question is how to teach these complex skills in higher education. Serious games hold potential to stimulate the acquisition of analytical skills. Rubrics are proven feedback and evaluation instruments, but have never been directly integrated into the gameplay of serious games. This position paper discusses how the novel integration of analytical rubrics into serious games may fill this gap. We discuss our approach for this integration and illustrate it using an implementation of analytical rubrics into an existing scenario- based serious game. The discussed approach involves creating theory-informed rubrics, performing validated mappings of rubric elements to game activities and the formulation of appropriate reflective feedback. In addition, we outline the design and implementation of a player-facing dashboard to allow players to track their progress, in-game performance in terms of analytical skills and to receive reflective feedback. Finally, we provide a brief outlook to an ongoing evaluation study examining the effectiveness of the integration of rubrics into serious games.