“Designing Entertaining Educational Games Using Procedural Rhetoric: A Case Study” by Doucet and Srinivasan
Conference:
- SIGGRAPH 2010
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More from SIGGRAPH 2010:
Type(s):
Title:
- Designing Entertaining Educational Games Using Procedural Rhetoric: A Case Study
Description:
This paper describes design and development of a video game about sustainable energy use that effectively unites fun with learning. It also presents results from an initial study of the educational impact of the game.
Many educational games do not properly translate knowledge, facts, and lessons into the language of games. The result: games that are often neither engaging nor educational. In this paper, game mechanics are used in new ways to express the educational content. The design combines the fantasy elements and game-play conventions of the real-time strategy genre with numbers, resources, and situations based on research about real-world energy production and use. The result is a game in which the player learns about energy use simply by trying to overcome the game’s challenges.
The game also presents a model for translating real-world topics into game mechanics using the language of procedural rhetoric. The real world is ripe with problems and situations that could inspire interesting game mechanics and provide new creative ideas for educational and traditional game designers.
The paper highlights key design aspects that contributed to making the game fun as well as educational. It also demonstrates that effective and engaging learning games can be developed with minimal effort, as long as sound game-design principles are used. Results from a combined quantitative/qualitative study show that players enjoyed the game, learned new things, and became more interested in energy use.
