The co.LAB Generic Framework for Collaborative Design of Serious Games: Development Study

ABSTRACTThe aim of this article is to advance a framework for understanding and teaching game design in higher education, in order to address complexities inherent in teaching game design courses. Everyday teaching and learning game design often deviate from the standard textbook model of game design. In reality everyday teaching and learning operate with handling game design curriculum, how to think games, and how to organise the development process. The presented framework merge curriculum, thinking, and process guided by the game design concept of juiciness. The framework will be presented by dismantling the standard textbook model of game design into three; game design (curriculum), game design thinking (thinking), and game development (organisation). In this perspective game design is concerned with game mechanics, game design thinking preoccupied with paper prototyping, metaphor, and framing, while game developments addresses player experience including play and game testing. This article will coin vertical design as juiciness as opposed to horizontal design understood as expanding system layout. Juiciness will be placed as a guiding principle in the relationship between designers and designed content as an aspect of designer intentions and motivations. Lastly, the content centric framework will be presented by merging game design, game design thinking, game development, vertical design with selected aspects of accepted software development strategies as an approach to teaching and learning game design in higher education.

This project focused on creating an interactive educational game prototype designed to strengthen cognitive and attention skills in children exhibiting symptoms of attention deficit, particularly during their critical developmental stagespreschool and early school years. Aware of the essential role these skills play in learning and overall development, the project sought to provide an effective tool that not only entertains but also educates and supports the enhancement of cognitive areas. To achieve this goal, a review of scientific literature related to child cognitive development and educational technologies was conducted. Key cognitive development theories and teaching methods were then identified and selected as the foundation for the game's design framework. These guided the selection of activities, strategies, and challenges to be incorporated into the game, ensuring alignment with the individual needs of the children. The game's design is based on a usability and accessibility approach tailored to children's cognitive and attention capacities. Through a set of engaging activities and challenges, and by leveraging the benefits of gamification, the game aims to maintain a high level of user engagement. To assess the effectiveness of the prototype, pilot tests were conducted with children, evaluating their attention and problem-solving skills. Preliminary results showed that the prototype was effective in improving children's concentration and problem-solving abilities, indicating its potential as a meaningful educational tool to address the causes of attention deficit. Ultimately, this project not only facilitated the development of innovative learning tools for schools but also had a significant impact on the cognitive and attentional development of the children who used them. It offered flexible and enjoyable learning experiences and laid the groundwork for balanced cognitive growth, enabling children to successfully face the challenges of today's world and make the most of modern technology.

Educational board games are a promising tool for implementing game-based learning to improve the teaching-learning process. However, the absence of comprehensive scholarly guidance on designing educational board games impedes the effective implementation of game-based learning in classrooms. The sparsely available studies on game design frameworks often confine themselves to the design of the educational game itself, without including guidelines for the classroom integration of such games within the design framework. Additionally, the literature often neglects that teachers, burdened by limited time and excessive workload, are often the sole participants in the game design process. To address these gaps, we introduce a practical framework for educators to design and seamlessly integrate educational board games in their classrooms. Our approach prioritizes minimizing additional teacher workload while using game-based learning to foster student-led problem-solving sessions and game revision. Drawing from game design principles and existing literature on game-based learning, we propose a comprehensive framework that guides educators through the design and implementation of educational board games tailored for conducting problem-solving sessions. The framework is validated and refined using qualitative analysis of teacher and student feedback after its seamless integration into the regular mathematics instruction and curriculum of a Philippine K-12 high school. Results indicate positive student experiences and highlight the framework’s efficacy in promoting student engagement, learning outcomes, and teacher convenience. Thematic analysis of student feedback highlights key design preferences and game features that enhance student experiences in GBL sessions. The study contributes to the advancement of GBL methodologies by offering practical guidelines for independent use by educators and promoting exchanges between teacher colleagues. Overall, the proposed framework offers a systematic and feasible approach to designing and implementing educational board games, fostering effective learning experiences in diverse educational contexts.

The use of 3D web-based models allows researchers to explore interesting characteristics searching for the increase of quality in the anatomy education. This chapter aims to present the design of a serious game for human anatomy education that can assist the students in the understanding of the anatomical structures as well as the relationship between them in a virtual environment. The digital game design and development was carried out in partnership with specialists in human anatomy for the study of the lower limb bones (skeletal system), vessels and arteries (cardiovascular system), and lower limb skeletal muscles (muscular system). A case study was performed with students of physiotherapy undergraduate program in the course of anatomy through usability assessment techniques. Based on the results obtained it was possible to identify fundamental and innovative features that have to be present in the design of serious games for the teaching of health sciences.

This chapter introduces a framework for the design of serious games for learning, called the design, play, and experience framework. The author argues that the great potential of serious games will not be realized without a formal design approach. To that end, the author presents and thoroughly explains the design, play, and experience framework which provides a formal approach to designing the learning, storytelling, game play, user experience, and technology components of a serious game. The author concludes by detailing how the framework provides a common language to discuss serious game design, a methodology to analyze a design, and a process to design a serious game for learning.

Previous studies have found that educational games (EG) provide immersion, motivation, fun and high level of engagement. Studies also found that EG are able to teach 21 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">st</sup> century skills. Thus, it is worth studying how this form of entertainment can be adapted into our teaching and learning strategies in order to develop our students' motivation and engagement, which is crucial in successful learning. However, designing and development of educational games with authentic learning content while maintaining the fun criteria can be challenging. Hence, a good design methodology and guideline is needed in assisting games development team to design an effective learning game. Our main attention is to produce a framework in educational games design for higher education. This paper analyses and compares a few frameworks available, then suggests a few criteria needed both from game design and pedagogy points of view. Hopefully it will shed some light in educational games design issues for higher education students.

General practitioners (GPs) have to professionally manage their practice. Studies on the quality of GP educational programs revealed that the majority of GP students are dissatisfied with what they learn about running an own general practice. They learn mostly theory from textbooks as opposed to hands-on experience. The new-generation GPs are raised digitally and need more modern learning methods. In this paper, we study the use of serious games to bridge this educational gap. First, we present the RIDEVA serious game design framework that expands existing literature and stresses the importance of mapping intended learning outcomes into formal and dramatic game elements. Second, we develop a prototype game for general practice management in the Dutch context to demonstrate and evaluate our design framework. The results obtained indicate that our serious game design has potential to bridge the educational gap, but also show room for improvement.

Motor rehabilitation helps impaired patients to regain their motor skills. Video game based therapies are an alternative form of rehabilitation claiming higher therapy adherence. Demands from medical, technical and user centered perspectives have thus far guided the development of these systems. Designing a single game complying with all the suggested principles remains unsolved. A common solution is to create collections of games, each one partially addressing a few demands, but even the design of each individual game is still challenging. Here, the COMFeeDY (Concept, objects, mechanics, feedback, and dynamics) framework is proposed as a response to the need of creating game-based rehabilitation systems composed of a variety of video games in a simpler, reusable, and faster way. The use of the framework is illustrated through the design of a game for upper limb rehabilitation. The current proposal represents the seed to what we envisaged should grow into a full framework further incorporating the medical and user centered principles so that games developed under the framework would have better chances of being therapeutically valid from onset. By using the proposed design framework, it is expected that the design process can be speeded up, components can be reused, and the development of these games be simplified.

This article takes part in the discussion that revolves around games and gaming and presents an example on how they have been implemented to the curriculum of Finnish art teacher training. The article explores the results of a nationwide survey for art teachers concerning games and gaming and how it supported the curriculum design for pre-serving art education students. The most significant addition to the curriculum was a master’s-level course ‘Games, Gaming and Game Design’. The article presents the course in detail and how it has evolved during four semesters between 2017 and 2020. The theoretical framework for the curriculum design was built on Deweyan pragmatist aesthetics and constructionist ludology. The article suggests that games and gaming are an integral part of art education and best addressed in a holistic manner, not only as visual representations or tools for learning.

Systematic enumeration and identification of unique 3D spatial topologies of complex engineering systems such as automotive cooling layouts, hybrid-electric power trains, and aero-engines are essential to search their exhaustive design spaces to identify spatial topologies that can satisfy challenging system requirements. However, efficient navigation through discrete 3D spatial topology options is a very challenging problem due to its combinatorial nature and can quickly exceed human cognitive abilities at even moderate complexity levels. Here we present a new, efficient, and generic design framework that utilizes mathematical spatial graph theory to represent, enumerate, and identify distinctive 3D topological classes for an abstract engineering system, given its system architecture (SA) — its components and interconnections. Spatial graph diagrams (SGDs) are generated for a given SA from zero to a specified maximum crossing number. Corresponding Yamada polynomials for all the planar SGDs are then generated. SGDs are categorized into topological classes, each of which shares a unique Yamada polynomial. Finally, for each topological class, one 3D geometric model is generated for an SGD with the fewest interconnect crossings. Several case studies are shown to illustrate the different features of our proposed framework. Design guidelines are also provided for practicing engineers to aid the utilization of this framework for application to different types of real-world problems.

While reconciling a creative game design process with a complex software engineering process is already a daunting task, serious games add another ingredient to an already volatile mixture: the challenge of crafting an effective learning experience. In order to achieve this strenuous objective, Group T’s e-Media Lab and the Centre for User Experience Research, K.U.Leuven, have developed a player-centered, iterative, interdisciplinary and integrated (P-III) framework. This framework has been developed over the course of five years of research on the design and development of serious games. Hence, P-III is built bottom-up, molded and shaped, tested and refined through several research projects [1,9,17,18,19,20,21,22,23]. While P-III also prescribes a specific process, in this paper we limit ourselves to highlighting the four pillars of the P-III framework, and their theoretical underpinnings.

This paper presents a review of the literature on gamification design frameworks. Gamification is a term that has been used recently to depict games application in other non-game field. However, there is no specific gamification framework designed for autism children in supporting their interaction skills. Before gamification process begin, it is very important to identify which frameworks or model exist and their main elements related to the scopes. Poor gamification design leads to the challenge to fulfill the research objectives, which aimed to enhance autism interaction skills among children. This review classifies existing methods and offers valuable insight on gamified solutions for autism children in supporting their interaction skills.

Object oriented design patterns (DP) are meant to provide a common structure for solving common software development problems. Applying those patterns is expected to improve the software systems maintainability, comprehensibility, and provide a common language for developers to understand and effectively communicate. However, this was not always the case, where some studies have shown that using design patterns may lead to a system harder to maintain and understand and more error prone; as compared to same systems without the use of design patterns. This variation is referred to the features of the system on hand, and the experience of the developers who are capable to know what design patterns to use and when. Considering the video game development, the use of software design pattern is still at low scale, and still; there is no recipe on what and when to use design patterns. In the meantime, there are different game design frameworks that define different aspects which need to be considered when developing a game. In this paper, we propose a framework that integrates some creational and behavioral DP, with a specific game design framework. In this way, we claim that the developers will have some hints on what DP to use with the main game aspects. This framework is suitable for games which can be developed after the first course of game design, regardless of the game engine used for development. The framework can be extended with more DP, for larger scale and more sophisticated game.

Design of serious games in engineering education: An application to the configuration and analysis of manufacturing systems

The design of Serious Games for training in complex areas of expertise presents many difficulties related to trainers’ participation in the design phase, the formalization of scenarios describing highly complex situations, the limited number of scenarios in Serious Games due to their high costs, and the low re-use level of real-life scenarios. This study proposes functional and technical infrastructure with ARGILE (Architecture for Representations, Games, Interactions, and Learning among Experts) for design of Serious Games. We illustrate our solution applied to a project in the sustainable development field.