A Functional Model of a Designer of Educational Maze Game

Game-based learning and serious games are popular topics among researchers and practitioners, resulting in multiple studies, demonstrating the various benefits to the users. The paper is based on the application of the TIMED-VGE taxonomy (or Taxonomy of Instruments for Management and Evaluation of the Design of Video Games for Education) in the APOGEE (smArt adaPtive videO GamEs for Education) software platform. The platform provides an automatic generation of educational video maze games (based on formal maze game descriptions as XML documents), personalization capabilities and personalized content, and adaptive gameplay. According to the application of the TIMED-VGE taxonomy in the APOGEE platform, the software tools are divided into two main categories (Assistive instruments and Analytics Instruments), which represent the whole set of tools facilitating the processes of the design and creation of educational video games in the APOGEE platform. The taxonomy represents the hierarchical structure of the software tools and in each category, there is a certain set of tools. The focus of this paper is on the development of a functional model of the instrument Maze Game Designer, based on the application of the TIMED-VGE taxonomy. The Maze Game Designer is in the category "Design management" instruments, according to the taxonomy. The tool is key to starting the process of designing and creating educational games in the APOGEЕ platform. Therefore, the paper presents further development of the Maze Game Designer instrument and its functionalities, based on the core user functionalities of the tool, analyzed and developed in previous publications of the author. As a result, the paper presents an extended version of the user functionalities of the Maze Game Designer instrument, based on the application of the TIMED-VGE taxonomy in the APOGEE software platform. Based on these functionalities, the paper presents the developed two functional models of the tool and the main workflow of the Maze Game Designer instrument. This includes a Functional model of the tool and a Detailed functional model of the Edit Maze Game use case of the Maze Game Designer instrument. All these results will serve for the future development of the tool. The development of a key instrument of the APOGEE software platform, according to the application of the TIMED-VGE taxonomy, will contribute to increasing the designer's capabilities to use the platform's instruments for the design and creation of improved video games for education.