Lessons Learned from the Development of a Mobile Learning Game Authoring Tool

Abstract

Students and schools are increasingly equipped with smartphones and tablets. These mobile devices can enhance teaching in many ways. Mobile Learning Games (MLGs) for example, have shown great potential for increasing student's motivation and improving the quality of situated learning. For the past few years, the research community has been working on authoring tools that allow teachers to create and distribute their own MLGs. The development of these authoring tools is challenging and time consuming and even more so if the objective is for these tools to actually be used in classrooms. The Design-Based Research (DBR) paradigm was precisely developed to address these central issues of Technology Enhanced Learning. It involves co-designing and testing with end-users from the beginning of the project. Although DBR increases the acceptance of new educational tools, it also adds several challenges, including the complexity of involving teachers and students in real-world situations and creating several versions of the tools that will be improved iteratively. In this paper, we aim at providing design principles and practical guidance on the way to develop such authoring tools, based on our experience. We conclude on lessons learned from this project and discuss some systematic issues we faced.

Design Principles for Serious Games Authoring Tool

“…And when games are used in a training context, there should be a "usage isolation" that ensures that changes in game scenarios may not affect the ongoing usage of the game. This principle is confirmed by [32] and linked to C2.2.…”

“…This principle is an extension of the proposed principle by Gicquel et al [32] to use only web technologies. We consider web technologies as a means to achieve platform independence rather than as a principle in itself.…”

“…In this section, we present a set of design principles (P) for serious games authoring tools. We defined these design principles based on the categorization of users, the desired characteristics of authoring tools, and previous research such as [7], [9], [13], [22], [32].…”

“…WEGAS has been developed as a full web platform, thus ensuring that both game development and usage are platform independent. Moreover, web technologies do not require users to perform any software installation, and can be updated without users intervention [32]. They also facilitate game usage in distant-learning modes.…”