Deploying learning materials to game content for serious education game development: A case study

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel approach for integrating learning materials into educational game content with minimal expert effort, demonstrated through a case study of the Chem Dungeon game.

Contribution

The paper introduces a new method to reduce the need for educational experts when deploying learning materials into game content, validated by a practical case study.

Findings

User surveys indicate the approach is effective.

The method simplifies the deployment process.

The case study demonstrates practical applicability.

Abstract

The ultimate goals of serious education games (SEG) are to facilitate learning and maximizing enjoyment during playing SEGs. In SEG development, there are normally two spaces to be taken into account: knowledge space regarding learning materials and content space regarding games to be used to convey learning materials. How to deploy the learning materials seamlessly and effectively into game content becomes one of the most challenging problems in SEG development. Unlike previous work where experts in education have to be used heavily, we proposed a novel approach that works toward minimizing the efforts of education experts in mapping learning materials to content space. For a proof-of-concept, we apply the proposed approach in developing an SEG game, named \emph{Chem Dungeon}, as a case study in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach. This SEG game has been tested with a number of users, and the user survey suggests our method works reasonably well.