Designing, Using and Evaluating Educational Games: Challenges, Some Solutions and Future Research

Educational games can use storytelling as the underlying model for designing their content and narrative to enhance learning outcomes. We need to evaluate their efficacy to maximise the user benefits. However, the field of user experience (UX) evaluation is full of challenges in itself; and evaluating the UX for digital educational games adds many other complexities. This paper presents various aspects involved in developing digital educational games and in evaluating the user experience derived from these. Felder Silverman learning style mode is presented to incorporate it into educational games and cater for a range of learners. A story design model called Movement Oriented Design (MOD) is presented to guide the process of creating effective educational narratives. A User Experience Research (UXeR) meta-model is presented as the pathway to advance research in this multidisciplinary field.

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