Curriculum Design Factors for Constructing Serious Educational Game: a Learning Objective Centric Approach

Educators and trainers face similar challenges in teaching specialized, rapidly evolving knowledge that often requires quick and cost-effective updates, working towards increased student time-on-task, and encouraging broad, active participation. The pedagogical potential for serious educational games to enhance the learning experience is recognized; however the development of games remains time consuming, expensive, and requiring substantial expertise from educators, game developers, and software engineers. New approaches are needed to effectively support instructors and trainers, typically experts in educational content, and enable them to rapidly and inexpensively deploy customized games. This short paper highlights the challenging and complex research issues in developing SEGs from a learning objective centric perspective, emphasizing the importance of closely establishing a connection between in-game activities and intended learning outcomes. It then presents initial work on a semi-automated, interactive approach that addresses the issue of developing a complex educational game design infrastructure for instructors.