Bridging Pedagogy and Play: Introducing a Language Mapping Interface for Human-AI Co-Creation in Educational Game Design
This addresses the problem of design barriers for non-expert educational game designers, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing authoring environments with a new interface approach.
The paper tackles the difficulty instructors face in designing educational games that achieve specific learning outcomes by introducing a web tool that uses a controlled natural language framework for LLM-assisted co-creation, enabling collaborative development of a structured language to map pedagogy to gameplay.
Educational games can foster critical thinking, problem-solving, and motivation, yet instructors often find it difficult to design games that reliably achieve specific learning outcomes. Existing authoring environments reduce the need for programming expertise, but they do not eliminate the underlying challenges of educational game design, and they can leave non-expert designers reliant on opaque suggestions from AI systems. We designed a controlled natural language framework-based web tool that positions language as the primary interface for LLM-assisted educational game design. In the tool, users and an LLM assistant collaboratively develop a structured language that maps pedagogy to gameplay through four linked components. We argue that, by making pedagogical intent explicit and editable in the interface, the tool has the potential to lower design barriers for non-expert designers, preserves human agency in critical decisions, and enables alignment and reflections between pedagogy and gameplay during and after co-creation.