Principles for educational game development for young children

The use of media devices such as tablets is increasing with 41% of children engaged in more than two hours of screen time per day. The number of educational games has also significantly increased but little has been to done to assess the effectiveness and validity. Given the increase in access and use of devices, and increased popularity of educational games, a set of principles is needed. We present guiding principles that are useful for the design and development of educational games for children, under 5 years. We provide evidence from child development research findings that games should: (1) be developmentally appropriate content; (2) integrate the theoretical frameworks from the learning science field; (3) embed learning in socially rich contexts; (4) develop diverse content; and (5) create a balance between play and real-world learning opportunities. We build the principles around a hypothetical educational game designed to facilitate language development.