Surviving the design of educational games: Borrowing from motivation and multimodal interaction

R&D challenges in design of games for learning focus on research and empirical studies to understand better what features of games can be used to improve learning outcomes, and guidelines based on that research to enable the community of developers to build effective educational games. To date, there is no common standard to design this kind of games and individual solutions are usually carried out by an ad hoc process. Our approach is based on framing games as educational tools that incorporate fun and learning through motivation as the key ingredient in the learning process, and multimodal interaction as the medium for conveying educational material. Proposed solution formalizes design process describing educational games in terms of estimated effects they produce on players. Building upon research on learning and motivation theory, we are connecting these effects with player learning preferences and motivation states. Our main contribution is to suggest design issues that should be taken into account when designing educational games. We exemplify the approach through our ongoing V-Strat project, framework for designing educational games.