Semi-automated serious educational game generation: A component-based game engineering approach

The use of serious educational games has many advantages, offering immersive, engaging and fun environments that require deep thinking and complex problem solving within a construct of overcoming obstacles and challenges. Developing new games, however, to support broad and rapidly evolving disciplines has remained time consuming, expensive, and requiring the expertise of game designers, software developers, software engineering educators, and players. Here, we introduce a semi-automated component-based engineering approach for generating serious educational games, which enables educators to rapidly and independently develop their own games across diverse educational topics. The game components are presented in this paper using a simplified example game on basic algebra for illustration.