Using serious games to foster wellbeing literacy in higher education students

Wellbeing refers to an individual’s positive feelings and effective functioning. In a Higher Education (HE) setting wellbeing sets the foundation for student academic performance and overall resilience to meet future workplace challenges. Nevertheless, evidence suggests that HE students experience higher rates of distress than the general population, and graduates experience stress when they transition to the workplace.

Bogart, a newly developed serious game of business ethics, is being used to promote wellbeing in HE students and support the generation of student wellbeing literacy (WL). WL is a soft skill that empowers students through the ability to articulate their personally experienced wellbeing challenges and stressors. We argue that WL is a crucial employability skill for HE graduates. Our research proposes that serious games, such as Bogart can foster WL. Bogart’s simulated work environment provides the perfect experimental vehicle for students to explore and test their responses to challenging workplace situations. Given that soft skills are fundamentally behavioural and real-life oriented, serious games, such as Bogart, provide a safe and cost-effective environment for HE students, to explore and interact with sometimes extreme behaviours to help them construct, practice and reflect on their WL skills.

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https://doi.org/10.1184/R1/16892077.v1