A Model-driven Framework for Educational Game Design

Educational games are a class of serious games whose main purpose is to teach some subject to their players. Despite the many existing design frameworks, these games are too often created in an ad-hoc manner, and typically without the use of a game design document GDD. We argue that a reason for this phenomenon is that current ways to structure, create and update GDDs do not increase the value of the artifact in the design and development process. As a solution, we propose a model-driven, web-based knowledge management environment that supports game designers in the creation of a GDD that accounts for and relates educational and entertainment game elements. The foundation of our approach is our devised conceptual model for educational games, which also defines the structure of the design environment. We present promising results from an evaluation of our environment with eight experts in serious games.