Learning and Pedagogy
Daedalus' End draws on a long - standing tradition of face-to-face and paper-based role playing negotiation games. Daedalus' End takes the basic conflict role playing game that is well established within social studies education, and adapts it into a digital environment for an engineering ethics audience.

As such, Daedalus' End shares much in common with Roger Schank's Goal-Based Scenarios. Goal-Based Scenarios are predicated on the idea that people learn best by doing. Players ask questions, gather resources, and formulate positions in the context of competition.

Unlike many Goal-Based Scnearios, Daedalus' End is designed to be multi-player from the ground up. We recognize the difficulties of presenting emotionally compelling or strategically interesting AI, and instead, use massively multi-player gaming as a context for students' learning.

Daedalus' End uses multi-player gaming structure so that players confront environmental education situations with real consequences. In multi-player gaming, there is no "save and restart"; there is no turning back. A player's decision to bulldoze a community or flood a native buriel ground cannot be undone. They will have to live with the consequences of their decisions.

Daedalus' End is designed to be used within a larger instructional context where players debrief, reflect, and take a step back from the gameplay to see what they might learn from the experience. Such debriefing will take place online using standard chat, bulletin board or messenger technologies, which is standard practice in online problem-based learning enviornments.

Copyright 2002, MIT.