Concept and Requirements for an Educational Serious Game Teaching Pandemic Management

The last three years showed that a deep understanding of pandemics, how they spread, and how they can be managed is of utmost importance. However, teaching students such complex topics is hard and cumbersome. Studies from other domains have already found, that students highly benefit from game-based learning approaches. Therefore, we developed a concept for a serious game, teaching students pandemic management. In this paper, we introduce our core gameplay concept, the methods of how requirements for such a serious game were derived as well as the final system architecture we developed to meet the identified requirements. We believe that such a game-based learning approach may significantly improve the understanding of pandemics and how to properly manage decisions in such a complex scenario.