Learning games and game-based learning have been taken into use in various fields of education. Even though the use of learning games has been widely studied, not enough is known about how to pedagogically design game development projects as learning environments. The development and design projects of games offer great potential and opportunities for learning across fields, such as information technology, business, and game design, etc. The working life of today and future call for multidisciplinary and collaboration skills, which need to be developed during formal education. Collaborative learning projects offer an authentic environment for learning these skills. In this paper we present the development and reflections on a pedagogical model involving a collaborative learning game design and development project. Our research question is: How the game design and development project can serve as a collaborative learning environment? In our study we had two goals: 1) to develop and experiment a pedagogical model based on collaborative game development, and 2) to develop and test the learning game itself, targeted for learning international business and trade.

Students of a university of applied science designed and developed, guided by the university teachers, a mobile learning game as a learning project. The game design and development project formed the learning environment for the students and other collaborators. The learning environment and the pedagogical model were developed by the teacher-researchers in parallel with the implementation of the game design project.