Designing Educational Games

Play has been an informal approach to teach young ones the skills of survival for centuries. With advancements in computing technology, many researchers believe that computer games1 can be used as a viable teaching and learning tool to enhance a student’s learning. It is important that the educational content of these games is well designed with meaningful game-play based on pedagogically sound theories to ensure constructive learning. This chapter features theoretical aspects of game design from a pedagogical perspective. It serves as a useful guide for educational game designers to design better educational games for use in game-based learning. The chapter provides a brief overview of educational games and game-based learning before highlighting theories of learning that are relevant to educational games. Selected theories of learning are then integrated into conventional game design practices to produce a set of guidelines for educational games design.

Games and the Development of Students’ Civic Engagement and Ecological Stewardship

In recent years, researchers and classroom teachers have started to explore purposefully designed computer/video games in supporting student learning. This interest in video and computer games has arisen in part, because preliminary research on educational video and computer games indicates that leveraging this technology has the potential to improve student motivation, interest, and engagement in learning through the use of a familiar medium (Gee, 2005; Mayo, 2009; Squire, 2005; Shaffer, 2006). While most of this early research has focused on the impact of games on academic and social outcomes, relatively few studies have been conducted exploring the influence of games on civic engagement (Lenhart et al, 2008). This chapter will specifically look at how Quest Atlantis, a game designed for learning, can potentially be utilized to facilitate the development of ecological stewardship among its players/students, thereby contributing to a more informed democratic citizenry.

Games and Simulations

Computer games and simulations are considered powerful tools for learning with an untapped potential for formal educational use. However, the lack of available well-designed research studies about their integration into teaching and learning leaves unanswered questions, despite their more than 30 years of existence in the instructional design movement. Beginning with these issues, this chapter aims to shed light on the definition of games and simulations, their educational use, and some of their effects on learning. Criticisms and new trends in the field of instructional design/development in relation to educational use of games and simulations are briefly reviewed. The chapter intends to provide a brief theoretical framework and a fresh starting point for practitioners in the field who are interested in educational use of games and simulations and their integration into learning environments.

Towards a Subjectively Devised Parametric User Model for Analysing and Influencing Behaviour Online Using Neuroeconomics

The quantitative-qualitative and subjectivity-objectivity debates plague research methods textbooks, divide academic departments, and confuse post-modernists as to their existence. Those from the objective-quantitative camps will usually demand methods assume parametric principles from the start, such as homogeneity and normal distribution. Many of the subjective-qualitative camps will insist on looking and the individual meanings behind what someone is saying through their narratives and other discourses. The objective-quantitative camps on the other hand think anything that does not involve systematic acquisition and analysis or data cannot be valid. This chapter presents an approach to derive a parametric user model for understanding users that makes use of the premises and ideals of both these camps.

From Chaos Towards Sense

Throughout educational settings there are a range of open-focused learning activities along with those that are much more closed and structured. The plethora of opportunities creates a confusing melee of opportunities for teachers as they attempt to create activities that will engage and motivate learners. In this chapter, the authors demonstrate a learner-centric narrative virtual learning space, where the unrestricted exploration is combined with mechanisms to monitor the student and provide indirect guidance through elements in the learning space. The instructional designer defines the scope of the story in which the teacher and learner create narratives (a sequence of actions and milestones to complete a given task), which can be compared, assessed, and awarded with badges and scores. The model is described using an example from logistics, where incoming orders have to be fulfilled by finding the good and delivering it to a given location in a warehouse. Preliminary studies showed that the model is able to engage the learner and create an intrinsic motivation and therewith curiosity to drive the self-paced learning.

My Click is My Bond

The growth in Internet use is not only placing pressure on service providers to maintain adequate bandwidth but also the people who run the Websites that operate through them. Called systems operators, or sysops, these people face a number of different obligations arising out of the use of their computer-mediated communication platforms. Most notable are contracts, which nearly all Websites have, and in the case of e-commerce sites in the European Union, there are contractual terms they must have. This chapter sets out to investigate how the role contract law can both help and hinder sysops and their users. Sysop powers are limited by sysop prerogative, which is everything they can do which has not been taken away by statute or given away by contract. The chapter finds that there are a number of special considerations for sysops in how they use contracts in order that they are not open to obligations through disabled or vulnerable users being abused by others.

Learning Sociology in a Massively Multi-Student Online Learning Environment

Is it possible to enhance the learning of sociology students by staging simulated field studies in a MMOLE (massively multi-student online learning environment) modeled after successful massively multiplayer online games (MMOG) such as Eve and Lineage? Lacking such a test option, the authors adapted an existing MMOG—“The Sims Online”—and conducted student exercises in that virtual environment during two successive semesters. Guided by questions keyed to course objectives, the sociology students spent 10 hours observing online interactions in TSO and produced essays revealing different levels of analytical and interpretive ability. The students in an advanced course on deviance performed better than those in an introductory course, with the most detailed reports focusing on scamming, trashing, and tagging. Although there are no technical obstacles to the formation and deployment of a sociology MMOLE able to serve hundreds of thousands of students, such a venture would have to solve major financial and political problems.

The Psychology of Trolling and Lurking

The rise of social networking services have furthered the proliferation of online communities, transferring the power of controlling access to content from often one person who operates a system (sysop), which they would normally rely on, to them personally. With increased participation in social networking and services come new problems and issues, such as trolling, where unconstructive messages are posted to incite a reaction, and lurking, where persons refuse to participate. Methods of dealing with these abuses included defriending, which can include blocking strangers. The Gamified Flow of Persuasion model is proposed, building on work in ecological cognition and the participation continuum, the chapter shows how all of these models can collectively be used with gamification principles to increase participation in online communities through effective management of lurking, trolling, and defriending.

Designing Serious Games for People with Disabilities

Serious games are effective and engaging learning resources for people with disabilities, and guidelines exist to make games accessible to people with disabilities. During research into designing accessible interfaces and games, it was noted that people who are blind often report enjoying playing Wii Sports. These games are pick-up-and-play games for casual and non-gamers. They have simplified rules and a natural and intuitive feel. Games designed specifically for players with particular disabilities are often not of interest to other players and take a lot of development time. Because of their niche market, these games are not widely available, developed, or maintained. In contrast, games like Wii Sports are cheap and available, and represent an exciting opportunity as inclusive games. Two blind players were introduced to the games and found Wii Tennis the most accessible. The blind players learned to play the game quickly and easily, found it enjoyable and engaging, and could play competitively against each other, as well as a sighted opponent. Small accessibility enhancements of the existing game could enhance the game for other players. In this paper, implications for the design of accessible, inclusive games are discussed.

Cognitive Load and Empathy in Serious Games

The design of serious games does not always address players’ empathy in relation to their cognitive capacity within a demanding game environment. Consequently players with inherent limitations, such as limited working memory, might feel emotionally drained when the level of empathy required by a game hinders their ability to cognitively attain the desired learning outcome. Because of the increasing attention being given to serious games that aim to develop players’ empathy along with their cognitive competencies, such as Darfur is Dying (Ruiz et al., 2006), there is a need to investigate the empirical relationship between players’ cognitive load and empathy development capacity during serious game play. Therefore this chapter examines cognitive load theory and empirical work on empathy development to propose a conceptual framework to inform the research and design of serious games that have empathy as part of the learning outcomes. Future research should focus on implementation and empirical validation of the proposed framework.