Micro-games for Quick Learning of Declarative Knowledge: Preliminary Application and Usability Testing

Serious games and gamified applications are increasingly used in a wide variety of contexts including education, corporate and military training, and healthcare to teach or train students and personnel in an engaging manner. Puzzle-based micro-games may be an advantageous method for quickly learning declarative knowledge, i.e. knowledge pertaining to facts and definitions. In military exercises and wargames, there is a need to quickly absorb declarative knowledge pertaining to a hypothetical scenario before beginning the exercise. In this work, an application of the micro-game concept within a military context, the Organizational Chart Puzzle (OCP) for learning a Command and Control (C2) structure, and results of usability testing are presented. The OCP was well-liked and easily learned by usability testing participants. Additionally, participants were asked to recreate the C2 structure from memory after playing the OCP and showed high knowledge transfer from the game to the paper test, suggesting this concept may be a viable path for quick learning of declarative knowledge.