Pattern oriented card game development: SOFTTY — A card game for academic learning of software testing

One of the biggest problems of educational games is the adequate integration of learning content into the game environment. Thereby the main challenge is to create a balance between gameplay and learning objectives and the correct transfer of learning principles into the game design. A useful approach is to identify game components and their specific learning constraints and the relationship between each other. By mapping learning elements to Game Design Pattern, we elaborate fundamentals for the concrete game design, focusing on card games. A shared description and an understanding of how the game design aligns with learning content facilitates the development of high quality educational games. A short illustration of our further developed implementation summarizes our experiences and shows an exemplary realization.