Scientific Background

What is behind Novicraft game?

The goal of the NoviCraft team training is to give the team a collaborative learning experience of a shared distributed problem-solving situation. The tasks in the NoviCraft game have been scripted based on several years of scientific research to promote every participants‘equal participation to the problem-solving activity. The tasks are built to launch the key mechanisms of collaborative learning, such as asking questions, helping others, explaining and listening. Through equal participation to the joint activity, the team has best chances for constructing shared view of situations, which nowadays is a key skill in every day work situations.

Constructing knowledge in teams

In order to be effective and successful in the solving of problems collaboratively, it is crucial that knowledge be continuously shared and constructed in teams. In practice, while team members search, collect, and share resources relevant to their problem solving, they construct knowledge that is shared between them. In successful collaboration, the team members echo and engage in the ideas of others by adding to each other’s ideas rather than ignoring or rejecting many contributions.

Awareness of the team skills

Through the NoviCraft training, we aim to increase individual’s awareness of the social aspects of the team work. Promoting awareness of team processes is essential, since there is more to learning than content knowledge. People may not learn to interact in productive ways just by doing collective work—many times, coaching in how to participate in effective collaboration and problem-solving is needed. It has been found that language plays a crucial role in learning, and for effective learning it is important to encourage participants to engage in certain ways of discussion and collaborative talk.

Building shared understanding

In practice, the team’s construction of shared understanding in their knowledge-construction process is contextually tied to situated activities. For success, it is essential that in all collaborative situations, the group builds a shared solution in their discussion. Both the content and the process of the common task have to be continuously coordinated, which sets demands on learning and presents challenges for enhancing the collaboration skills of all who work in teams.

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