Practical, appropriate, empirically-validated guidelines for designing educational games
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Accepted Version
Date
2011-01
Authors
Linehan, Conor
Kirman, Ben
Lawson, Shaun
Chan, Gail
Hodgson, Timothy L.
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
Published Version
Abstract
There has recently been a great deal of interest in the potential of computer games to function as innovative educational tools. However, there is very little evidence of games fulfilling that potential. Indeed, the process of merging the disparate goals of education and games design appears problematic, and there are currently no practical guidelines for how to do so in a coherent manner. In this paper, we describe the successful, empirically validated teaching methods developed by behavioural psychologists and point out how they are uniquely suited to take advantage of the benefits that games offer to education. We conclude by proposing some practical steps for designing educational games, based on the techniques of Applied Behaviour Analysis. It is intended that this paper can both focus educational games designers on the features of games that are genuinely useful for education, and also introduce a successful form of teaching that this audience may not yet be familiar with.
Description
Keywords
Education , Educational games , Serious games , Games design , Applied behaviour analysis , Psychology , Behavioural psychology
Citation
Linehan, C., Kirman, B., Lawson, S. and Chan, G. (2011) ‘Practical, appropriate, empirically-validated guidelines for designing educational games’, in Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '11), Vancouver, BC, Canada, 7-12 May. New York, NY, USA: ACM, pp. 1979-1988. doi: 10.1145/1978942.1979229
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© 2011, ACM. This is the author’s version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '11)