Using a Virtual World for Transferable Skills in Gaming Education

This paper suggests that some of the needs for transferable skills in general, and in particular for the gaming industry, can be met by the appropriate use of gaming and virtual world environments. We hope to show that virtual worlds provide a logical progression in the use of computer mediated learning tools within a constructivist pedagogical perspective. We briefly discuss the educational properties of virtual worlds and in particular that of Second Life. We propose a project for developing group work which seeks to link affordances in the environment to learning outcomes and employs a socially-situated constructivist pedagogical framework derived from educational learning theory.