Enabling Educators to Design Serious Games – A Serious Game Logic and Structure Modeling Language

Abstract

Serious games are applications combining educational content with gameplay by integrating learning objectives into a game-like environment to keep up the player’s motivation to continue playing, and hence learning. This characteristic is highly sought after in educational contexts, making serious games a big asset for didactics [1]. Offering new learning contents through a game not only induces higher motivation, employing serious games can also yield higher learning success than presenting material in a classical, non-computer based, way [2]. Only few people having the proper didactical background to tailor the learning objectives to the students’ need also have the programming knowledge and game design skills allowing them to develop didactically and technically sound serious games [3, 4]. In this paper, we argue for an approach to enable didactical experts, i.e. educators, to develop serious games adapted to their own learning content. To address this problem we develop a tool allowing educators to visually design their serious games, which is based on model driven development techniques that allow the generation of software from visual models. We describe the first step towards this tool, the development of the underlying domain specific modeling language (DSML).

Parts of this research were funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the European Social Fund in the project BlendedContENT (www.blendedcontent.de), FKZ 01PF08022A.