Open Badges: Experiences From a Game Development Skills Open Badge Co-Creation Process

Both the game industry and game education have developed enormously during the past ten years in Finland. However, the skills and competences needed for employment in a game company are only partially provided by the formal education. Instead, many skills are learned in an informal way outside educational programmes, and the current educational system fails to identify and to recognize these skills. Additionally, the competences of graduates from the formal education are not sufficiently communicated to the potential employers. Open badges are introduced as a promising solution to this challenge. Our research questions are: 1) How the project management skills and competences of game development bachelor's degree students can be identified and acknowledged with digital badges? 2) How the project management badges can be co-created and collaboratively designed? Our research approach was qualitative, and for the development of the open badge we chose to utilise service design. Service design methodology enables analysing and understanding the needs of the users. In addition, service design promotes a participatory mind-set, where users are seen as partners and active co-creators. Furthermore, service design enables agile project work including prototyping, testing and iterating. In this paper we report a case study and collaborative development process of an open badge in the field of project management skills in game development. Our observations highlight the significant role of project management skills, e.g. teamwork skills, in the game business in addition to the software engineering skills, and the importance of the capability to identify those skills at bachelor level in order to improve the employability of the game development students. Further, we discuss the benefits of the collaborative model of designing project management badges with the help of service design methods.