skip to main content
10.1145/3631085.3631239acmotherconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagessbgamesConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

End-user Game Development Environments for Educators: Analyzing Platforms

Published: 19 January 2024 Publication History

Abstract

Games have been used for many years in educational contexts. They are called serious games. With the increasing presence of digital games in the everyday life of people and, therefore, of children and teenagers, educators sometimes adopt these games as part of their instructional activities. As educational games have a purpose beyond entertainment, educators sometimes want to use more than off-the-shelf games but also customize or create new games to suit their needs. However, developing games is a complex task involving aspects such as programming and game design. In this paper, we investigated what game-authoring tools aimed at educators for creating serious games offer to enable the creation and extension of educational games. We used the Semiotic Inspection Method to analyze two game authoring tools for educators - Rufus and <u-Adventure>. We contrasted our results with a study focusing on general-purpose game authoring tools and identified specific constructs and strategies to support end-users that the platforms we analyzed adopted for the educational context, in addition to those identified in general-purpose tools.

References

[1]
Julian Alvarez, Damien Djaouti, 2011. An introduction to Serious game Definitions and concepts. Serious games & simulation for risks management 11, 1 (2011), 11–15.
[2]
Eelco Braad, Gregor Žavcer, and Alyea Sandovar. 2016. Processes and models for serious game design and development. In Entertainment Computing and Serious Games: International GI-Dagstuhl Seminar 15283, Dagstuhl Castle, Germany, July 5-10, 2015, Revised Selected Papers. Springer, 92–118.
[3]
Kamila Rios da Hora Rodrigues, Ticianne de Gois Ribeiro Darin, and Vânia Paula de Almeida Neris. 2022. Building your own games: A platform for authoring digital games. In 2022 21st Brazilian Symposium on Computer Games and Digital Entertainment (SBGames). IEEE, 1–6.
[4]
Alessandro De Gloria, Francesco Bellotti, and Riccardo Berta. 2014. Serious Games for education and training. International Journal of Serious Games 1, 1 (2014).
[5]
Clarisse Sieckenius De Souza. 2005. The semiotic engineering of human-computer interaction. MIT Press.
[6]
Clarisse Sieckenius de Souza. 2017. Semiotic engineering: a cohering theory to connect EUD with HCI, CMC and more. New perspectives in end-user development (2017), 269–305.
[7]
Clarisse Sieckenius de Souza, Carla Faria Leitão, Raquel Oliveira Prates, Sílvia Amélia Bim, and Elton José da Silva. 2010. Can inspection methods generate valid new knowledge in HCI? The case of semiotic inspection. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 68, 1-2 (2010), 22–40.
[8]
Joana Gabriela Ribeiro de Souza and Raquel Oliveira Prates. 2021. Games by End-Users: Analyzing Development Environments. In 2021 20th Brazilian Symposium on Computer Games and Digital Entertainment (SBGames). IEEE, 69–78.
[9]
Joana Gabriela Ribeiro de Souza and Raquel Oliveira Prates. 2022. Professores do ensino fundamental brasileiro: contexto social em que estão inseridos e a relação com jogos educacionais. In Anais Estendidos do XXI Simpósio Brasileiro de Jogos e Entretenimento Digital. SBC, 846–855.
[10]
Alexandros Gazis and Eleftheria Katsiri. 2023. Serious Games in Digital Gaming: A Comprehensive Review of Applications, Game Engines and Advancements. WSEAS Transactions on Computer Research 11 (2023), 10–22.
[11]
Paul Gross and Caitlin Kelleher. 2010. Non-programmers identifying functionality in unfamiliar code: strategies and barriers. Journal of Visual Languages & Computing 21, 5 (2010), 263–276.
[12]
[12] Dagoberto André Guzzo. 2020. A utilização de jogos educacionais digitais como proposta de metodologia ativa de ensino para uma aprendizagem significativa na educação básica. Bachelor’s Thesis.
[13]
Christopher M Kanode and Hisham M Haddad. 2009. Software engineering challenges in game development. In 2009 Sixth International Conference on Information Technology: New Generations. IEEE, 260–265.
[14]
Tanja Koehler, Andreas Dieckmann, and Peter Russell. 2008. An evaluation of contemporary game engines. In Proceedings of the 26th eCAADe Conference. 743–750.
[15]
Fabrício Horácio Sales Pereira, Raquel Oliveira Prates, Cristiano Maciel, and Vinícius Carvalho Pereira. 2017. Combining configurable interaction anticipation challenges and volitional aspects in the analysis of digital posthumous communication systems. Journal on Interactive Systems 8, 2 (2017).
[16]
Ivan J Perez-Colado, Victor M Perez-Colado, Ivan Martínez-Ortiz, Manuel Freire-Moran, and Baltasar Fernández-Manjón. 2017. UAdventure: The eAdventure reboot: Combining the experience of commercial gaming tools and tailored educational tools. In 2017 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON). IEEE, 1755–1762.
[17]
Víctor Manuel Pérez-Colado, Iván José Pérez-Colado, Manuel Freire-Morán, Iván Martínez-Ortiz, and Baltasar Fernández-Manjón. 2019. UAdventure: Simplifying narrative serious games development. In 2019 IEEE 19th International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT), Vol. 2161. IEEE, 119–123.
[18]
Panagiotis Petridis, Ian Dunwell, David Panzoli, Sylvester Arnab, Aristidis Protopsaltis, Maurice Hendrix, and Sara de Freitas. 2012. Game engines selection framework for high-fidelity serious applications. International Journal of Interactive Worlds (2012).
[19]
Kamila Rios da Hora Rodrigues, Vania Paula de Almeida Neris, Paula Maia Souza, Rodrigo Geurgas Zavarizz, Jonattan Willian da Silva, Tiago Marino Silva, and Aline Elias Cardoso Verhalen. 2021. Rufus-uma plataforma de autoria para jogos digitais terapêuticos. In X Latin American Conference on Human Computer Interaction. 1–5.
[20]
Rafael Savi and Vania Ribas Ulbricht. 2008. Jogos digitais educacionais: benefícios e desafios. Renote 6, 1 (2008).
[21]
Jennifer Tomalá Gonzáles, José Guamán-Quinche, Edwin Guamán-Quinche, Wilman Chamba-Zaragocin, and Silvana Mendoza-Betancourt. 2020. Serious Games: Review of methodologies and Games engines for their development. In 2020 15th Iberian Conference on Information Systems and Technologies (CISTI). IEEE, 1–6.
[22]
Javier Torrente, Ángel Del Blanco, Eugenio J Marchiori, Pablo Moreno-Ger, and Baltasar Fernández-Manjón. 2010. < e-Adventure>: Introducing educational games in the learning process. In IEEE EDUCON 2010 Conference. IEEE, 1121–1126.

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Serious Games in Higher Education in the Transforming Process to Education 4.0—Systematized ReviewEducation Sciences10.3390/educsci1403028114:3(281)Online publication date: 7-Mar-2024

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences
SBGames '23: Proceedings of the 22nd Brazilian Symposium on Games and Digital Entertainment
November 2023
176 pages
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 19 January 2024

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. end-user development. educational games
  2. scientific SIM

Qualifiers

  • Research-article
  • Research
  • Refereed limited

Conference

SBGames 2023

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)38
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)3
Reflects downloads up to 19 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Serious Games in Higher Education in the Transforming Process to Education 4.0—Systematized ReviewEducation Sciences10.3390/educsci1403028114:3(281)Online publication date: 7-Mar-2024

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

HTML Format

View this article in HTML Format.

HTML Format

Figures

Tables

Media

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media