A decline in European students’ interest in STEM subjects, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic’s disruption of education, has raised concerns about the continent’s future workforce. To address this challenge, this study investigates the efficacy of the BIG GAME project methodology, a cooperative story-driven digital game approach designed to engage secondary students in collaborative environmental problem-solving. Implemented across Romania, Italy, Estonia, and Finland, this six-month study employed a mixed-methods design involving 62 teachers and 239 students in ten distinct game missions focused on environmental challenges. The quantitative results indicated significant improvements in students’ transversal skills (teamwork, communication, and critical thinking), as reported by over 75% of teachers. The qualitative data emphasised the value of structured peer review in developing students’ reflective practices. This research underscores the importance of teacher facilitation in game-based learning and problem-based simulations and highlights the potential of such methodologies to boost student engagement and environmental awareness. These findings suggest that the BIG GAME project approach could be a valuable tool for revitalising STEM education and cultivating future-ready citizens.

Games have been widely recognized as methods of making learning more engaging. This has proven to be very attractive to those attempting to get complex fields such as cybersecurity training to a wider audience. Unfortunately, there is a failure to understand that each type of game serves a different educational purpose, leading to the situation where the games are being selected incorrectly and are failing to fulfill their promise. To address this issue, key concepts in learning and games were identified from the literature and then operationalized into an analytical framework. The concepts of player agency, message broadcasting, the transfer of learning and the type of challenges present in the game were selected. This generated a framework that is player-focused rather than content-focused and could be applied to any potential learning game. To validate the framework, three cybersecurity games were selected and analyzed using a ludo-textual approach. Cyberciege, a single player game aimed at university students, Spoofy, a kids’ web browser game and Tallinn Soldier, a seminar wargame, were selected to give as wide a sample as possible. The paper goes on to report on the results of the analysis and discuss how this may be used to examine and design learning games for cybersecurity in the future. Each of the selected games focus on different mechanisms for learning and engagement, highlighting the design tradeoffs that were made in the creation of the game. The proposed analytical framework can be applied not just to cybersecurity training games but theoretically to understanding any game that has learning as its objective.

The current world is in a state of volatility, uncertainty, and complexity, characterized by the emerging challenges to democratic systems across multiple domains. Preparing to meet these complex challenges requires tools that help to build resilience and adaptability. While serious games and wargames have a long history of being applied to this goal, they often limit the player agency and creativity. This case study introduces Threat Forge, a narrative co-creation game designed to explore potential futures by integrating game mechanics with techniques used in future studies. It explores how the structure of this game enables players to engage in meaningful discussion of concepts as defined by frameworks like DIME and PMESII even when they have not received direct training in these frameworks. The results of a formal playtest using the CORGIS survey, as well as thematic analysis of the discussion and observation of play are presented. The results show that the type of challenges that player experiences within the game are consistent with designing a game to encourage a serious and deep reflection on complex issues. In addition, they show that the discussion was consistent with frameworks used to discuss conflict. The play-testers felt that the game was a useful method of structuring a discussion on complex issues. In conclusion, narrative co-creation games offer an important addition to the field of serious games that will need to be subjected to further study and investigation.