Enhancing the Teaching of Key Concepts and System Thinking Through Reflexive Approaches in Open-World Games: A Best Practice Model for Higher Education Lectures and Seminars in Geography

Key concepts are fundamental guiding ideas of systemic thinking that are comprehensible to learners and that can be found in the various different geographic subject matters. They represent systematic patterns of thought and analysis patterns as well as explanatory approaches, and they can represent the subject-specific approach of geography to a learning object. Thus, the key concepts and the responsibility to understand the objectives and structure of these concepts in the teacher training program in geography play an important role. However, due to a certain level of abstraction, it is often difficult for students/pupils to internalize the (full) complexity and scope of these key concepts. Therefore, it is important to continue to strive for innovative teaching concepts in order to anchor the guiding ideas of the key concepts sustainably through emotional learning and memorable examples that perhaps go beyond previous views. Video games are an essential part of youth culture and systems in itself. Video games create digital spaces that deal with geographical issues. Video games further somehow digitally represent aspects of the real world and therefore shape the views students/pupils gain of the world. Therefore, competences for students/pupils are important that enable a mature, reflective handling of games. These are all reasons why video games should be further integrated as a medium in geography education. The article presents a best practice of seminars and lectures for teacher students in an early stage of their professionalization in which open world games were used to reflexively teach key concepts. Furthermore, the digression discussed with the students the potentials for using the games in the classroom to teach basic geographical thinking approaches. For this purpose, the goals, structures, courses of action, further gameplay elements, and game design decisions used in the games are considered. The paper serves to incorporate a best practice into the discourse around the potential of video games for reflexive methods in higher education teaching and in geography education and calls for increased empirical testing of these ideas as well.