Evaluating Learning Games during their Conception
This work addresses the challenge for educational game designers by providing a tool to improve efficiency, though it is incremental as it builds on existing design evaluation methods.
The authors tackled the problem of costly and time-consuming development of Learning Games by proposing a set of quality indicators for early evaluation during the design phase, which were validated by experts on 24 games and helped reduce alteration phases.
Learning Games (LGs) are educational environments based on a playful approach to learning. Their use has proven to be promising in many domains, but is at present restricted by the time consuming and costly nature of the developing process. In this paper, we propose a set of quality indicators that can help the conception team to evaluate the quality of their LG during the designing process, and before it is developed. By doing so, the designers can identify and repair problems in the early phases of the conception and therefore reduce the alteration phases, that occur after testing the LG's prototype. These quality indicators have been validated by 6 LG experts that used them to assess the quality of 24 LGs in the process of being designed. They have also proven to be useful as design guidelines for novice LG designers.