This paper describes the teaching and learning pedagogy in a History of Design and Interfaces course and focuses on the final exam project, which embraced interactive gaming techniques to promote and assess individual and group learning, as well as to foster creative and critical thinking skills in the first-year Interaction Design students. A final and collective project (the design of a board-game based on design history that the students named “Design Tales”) intentionally replaced the traditional oral or written exam for the course. It gave students an opportunity to utilize individual and collective knowledge gained in the course and served as a metric for valorising their learning. Points of view obtained from questionnaires and surveys from those who participated in the course are presented and discussed in the expanded paper.

According to some authors, board-gaming represents a kind of oasis from the constant overlapping and compression of information typical of our daily experience mediated by digital technologies. This concept is helpful in setting the pedagogy, organization, goals and objectives, learning outcomes and final output from the course. The structure of the course included lectures, readings, discussion, group work, individual work, in-class presentations and an interactive final project. Student output from the course was regularly evaluated and feedback shared. The final exam was designed to promote and valorise all learning metrics in the course.

Instead of using only game elements into a traditional educational context (known as gamification), playful learning was promoted by the introduction of individual and group research that led to creative and critical thinking about the History of Design. The final exam for the course was conceived as an opportunity for students to create an interaction-based project that incorporated all their learning and gave an opportunity to experience interaction design. The students decided to embody this concept in the form of a card game to learn about the history of Design and interfaces: Design Tales.

In the expanded paper, the authors focus on how students conceived and developed Design Tales, and how it was designed to promote individual and group learning, as well as foster creative and critical thinking skills. Feedback from the students stated the exam was an opportunity to utilize knowledge gained in other courses in the first year and served as a means of fostering important aspects of socialization and critical thinking skills.

Student feedback verified that the final exam was a positive learning experience and positioned first-year students at the forefront of their education in Interaction Design utilizing interface, participation, broad learning methods, feedback, discussion, and designed output as important metrics for learning. Innovation was not only in the approach of rethinking traditional paradigms in teaching and learning, but also in the approach to rethinking the role, delivery and metrics of a final exam in a History of Design and Interfaces course.

Keywords: Innovative Learning and Teaching, Game based Learning, Gamification, Interaction Design, First year.