Playing to Learn: Guidelines for Designing Educational Games (ED-MEDIA 2008)

ED-MEDIA 2008 paper: Playing to Learn: Guidelines for Designing Educational Games.

Abstract: Using computer games and games in general for educational purposes offers a variety of knowledge presentations and creates opportunities to apply the knowledge within a virtual world, thus supporting and facilitating learning processes. An innovative educational paradigm such as game-based learning, and guidelines for educational game design are discussed in the first part of the paper. The second part of the paper provides an example of a multi-user collaborative learning platform, “The Training Room”, and outlines the game concept employed.

• Author has built on the Garris model of game building.
• Many COTS are not historically factual or follow scientific laws (because they don’t want to employ those content experts).
• For a game to be immersive, it must be fun and/or challenging. Otherwise it’s just homework!
• 40% of students at Graz University in Austria do not like computers, the internet and games.
• He demo’d The Training Room, a flash-based scenario-based game where the story is created by the moderator. Each team needs some information from another team, but there is much distrust between them because of ulterior motives and cultural differences. It’s a negotiation game between the Vulcans, the Shadows, the Narns, etc. with consensus needing to be reached on five goals. The designers used characters from existing fiction, e.g. Star Trek. The players need to find out info about their team from the web, e.g. Vulcan on Wikipedia.

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Authors: (website) ; Maja Pivec