Video gamEs foR Skills trAining

Project Information

VERSA

Grant agreement ID: 101006420

DOI

10.3030/101006420

Project closed

EC signature date 30 October 2020

Start date 1 February 2021

End date 31 January 2023

Funded under

• Make scientific and technological careers attractive to young students, and forster sustainable interaction between schools, research institutions, industry and civil society organisations

Total cost

€ 297 500,00

EU contribution

€ 297 500,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITAT ROVIRA I VIRGILI
Spain

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - VERSA (Video gamEs foR Skills trAining)

Reporting period: 2021-02-01 to 2023-01-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Doctoral students will surely have a key role in the future of Europe, which is meant to be as a smart, sustainable, socially inclusive and innovative society. But while these junior researchers receive high quality scientific training, it needs to be accompanied by a series of soft skills that today’s global labour markets value alongside field of expertise, such as being innovative, having an entrepreneurial mindset, interdisciplinary knowledge or inclusive thinking.

At the same time, training methods for soft or transversal skills are often outdated, driving PhD students to boredom and lack of implication. Therefore, VERSA aims to challenge the current paradigm of soft skills development at PhD level by implementing an innovative methodology for soft skills training using commercially available video games.

Thus, there is a dual scope to VERSA's approach: on the one hand, we aim to modernize the PhD programs at the partner universities by offering innovative digital tools for soft skills training in order to prove this as a consistent methodology for future use in any PhD's program curricula. On the other hand, we aim to improve the soft skills of our participants so that they have more opportunities of finding a job when they finish their doctoral studies.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Since March 2021, date in which the Kick-off Meeting of the Project took place, and also in the previous months, we have been working in the implementation of this new soft skill training methodology, developed by Fundación Iberoamericana del Conocimiento (GECON), applied to PhD students of the three universities that participate in the Project: Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU, The Nederlands), Innsbruck University (UIBK, Austria) and Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV, Spain). So far, we have fully completed the first three modules of VERSA, aimed to improve the Cognitive flexibility, Creativity, and Critical thinking skills of our participants through three respective videogames: Portal 2, Cities skylines, and Anomaly 2.

Moreover, we are in the point of finishing Module 4 (Complex problem solving) and in the middle of Module 5 (Team management), so we have reached half way of the project. During this time, we have managed to implement the modules without major problems and to follow the plans that we had established at the beginning. Furthermore, we are starting to obtain the first results that seem to indicate a positive effect of the project in the soft skill development of our participants.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

As aforementioned, our final goal is to test if this methodology based on the use of commercial videogames for the development of soft skills is an effective and reliable training method in high level education. Therefore, we want to increase the scientific knowledge in relation to the use of video games in academic contexts, with the possibility that academic and industrial stakeholders can also implement our methodology.

In this respect, we aim to have a socio-economic impact in terms of a better labour market accessibility of our PhD students as a result of their improvement in soft skills, that are highly valued for companies nowadays.

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