User-centered research in the early stages of a learning game

Abstract

Games offer a compelling medium for learning. However, designing a successful learning game that features engagement alongside its educational objectives is a craft that is still underway. Our research adapts a user-centered approach toward designing a game that will teach children conflict resolution skills. By involving users of the game, namely teachers and students, in the design process we reveal new considerations for how to create convincing narratives of conflict, sustain children's engagement and gain teachers' support. At the same time, our work highlights the challenges facing researchers in this domain who must balance users' values, needs and expectations with the game's learning objectives.

Is Participatory Design Associated with the Effectiveness of Serious Digital Games for Healthy Lifestyle Promotion? A Meta-Analysis

“…When examining user roles separately, a positive association was only significant when users were involved as informants and not when they were codesigners. This confirms observations from case studies that involving users as informants may be more effective than as codesigners in certain design elements [80,81]. …”

“…Case studies have suggested involving users as informants is more beneficial than involving them as codesigners [80,81], since users are often unable to consider game characteristics in relation to the learning objectives [81]. Our meta-analysis showed that the number of design elements where users were involved as informant or as codesigner did not significantly relate to game effectiveness on behavior or behavioral determinants.…”

Supporting engagement in research through a game design competition

“…Although we were aware that participation was likely to drop off, we considered the whole competition as an exercise in engaging different people at different points: attending the kick-off event, developing a game, attending the showcase and, inally, playing the games online. As such, although the competition did experience relatively high attrition rates, we were able to introduce a variety of people to the concepts of human error and blame culture -potentially more so than if we had focused primarily on involving a small number of people in workshops (as can be the case in participatory design for serious games; see, for example, Danielsson and Wiberg, 2006;Vasalou et al, 2012).…”

Game Jams as a Space to Tackle Social Issues

“…A range of approaches for involving non-experts in game design have been proposed in the literature. Naming a few, Carvalho [3] presented a framework for educational game design that could also be used by non-experts to conceptualise educational games; Vasalou et al [34] created a process where children could develop educational game design ideas; De Jans et al [4] and Marne et al [22] have created a process where people with different areas of expertise could design educational games. Additional to that, game engines aiming at lowering technological barriers to design games are emerging [15,24].…”