Serious Game Design: Motivating Students through a Balance of Fun and Learning

Stagnating growth in our educational systems has piqued interests in alternative teaching methods such as the inclusion of "serious games" into curricula. In response to those needs, a series of educational games have been developed in accordance with pre-engineering programs such as Project Lead the Way (PLTW). The focus of development is in creating an engaging, educational environment by balancing fun and learning whilst meeting the standards of commercial-level games. In this paper, we present methods, and the implementation of those methods, for serious game design that accommodates the integration of game mechanics with learning. The focuses on narrative-learning synthesis, supplementing the player's actions with feedback, and the development of a sufficient guidance system without compromising the entertainment or education aspects of a game are presented. Student-based evaluations of the game realism and the utility and usability of the learning tools in promoting students' interests and learning are also presented based on game deployment in both in- and out-of- school settings

I. Introduction

Human-computer interaction techniques for computer games are one of the hottest topics in terms of research and development. Although a lot of different interaction approaches exist (e.g. mouse, keyboard, joystic, Nintento Wii controller, Microsoft Kinect, Guitar Hero, etc) they require a lot of physical effort. This restricts user's expressive capabilities as well as the information transfered from the user to the computer [1]. During the past few years, non-invasive brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) seem to be getting a lot of attention as alternative human-computer interaction devices for games and virtual environments [2], [3].