Educational game design: game elements for promoting engagement

TL;DR

This study identifies key game elements across story, gameplay, and atmosphere that effectively promote engagement among high school students in educational games, highlighting the need for practical design techniques.

Contribution

It uncovers ten specific game elements that enhance engagement in educational games and emphasizes the importance of practical design guidance over theoretical approaches.

Findings

Ten effective game elements identified

Engagement strategies similar to entertainment games

Highlighting the need for educational game design techniques

Abstract

Engagement in educational games, a recently popular academic topic, has been shown to increase learning performance, as well as a number of attitudinal factors, such as intrinsic interest and motivation. However, there is a lack of research on how games can be designed to promote engagement. This mixed methods case study aimed to discover effective game elements for promoting 17-18 year old high school students' engagement with an educational game. Using within-case and cross-case analyses and triangulated data, 10 elements emerged and were categorized into the constructs of story, gameplay, and atmosphere. Examples and connections to the literature for each element are reported. Findings implicate that educational game design for both learning and engagement is composed of educational-game specific elements, game design for solely engagement is similar for both educational and entertainment games, and a gap on educational game design technique instead of theory should be addressed to further benefit educational game development.