Serious Game Design for Children: A Set of Guidelines and their Validation

Digital games can be used as allies to support and motivate the learning process. Many researchers focus their studies on the so-called Serious Games (SG), which are games whose primary objective is not solely entertainment. What happens, however, is that these games end up being far from children's expectations, especially when compared to entertainment-only games. Thus, this work reviewed the literature in search for positive experiences of developing and using SG for children. Afterward, they were compiled together as a set of guidelines that can be followed by designers and developers of SG for children, guiding the design decisions so that the final product would be better suitable to children. The set of guidelines was obtained through SG analysis of childoriented and child technology recommendations, leading to a total of forty guidelines that are divided into four groups: input, output/interface, content, and control. They have been assessed by 59 experts which concluded that they were all worth attention when designing SG for children.