Deploying learning materials to game content for serious education game development: A case study

The ultimate goals of serious educational games (SEG) are to facilitate learning and maximizing enjoyment during playing SEGs. In SEG development, there are normally two spaces to be taken into account: knowledge space regarding learning materials and content space regarding games to be used to convey learning materials. How to deploy the learning materials seamlessly and effectively into game content becomes one of the most challenging problems in SEG development. Unlike previous work where experts in education have to be involved heavily, we proposed a novel approach that works toward minimizing the efforts of education experts in mapping learning materials to content space. For a proof-of-concept, we apply the proposed approach in developing a SEG game, named Chem Dungeon, as a case study in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach. This SEG game has been tested with a number of users, and the user survey suggests our method works reasonably well.