Dealing with threshold concepts in serious games for competence development

This paper presents an approach to integrate Threshold Concepts into a Serious Game based learning platform aimed at learning soft skills such as leadership, stakeholder involvement and negotiation. Threshold Concepts are concepts that once grasped, transform the way a learner sees a discipline, marking the difference between a novice and an expert. However, learners have difficulties when dealing with Threshold Concepts as they are counter intuitive. Therefore the design of a Serious Game needs to take into account the existence of Threshold Concept that may affect the overall learning experience of the learner, and subsequently design recovery actions when the hoped learning effect does not take place. In this paper we describe what Threshold Concepts are and how they were taken into consideration in the scope of the TARGET project when doing the design of the Game-Based learning platform. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.