Towards model-driven game engineering for serious educational games: Tailored use cases for game requirements

Educational games are essential in the next generation of e-learning tools because games stress visual and experiential learning; they require active involvement by student players while providing almost instantaneous feedback. The long term goal of this research project is to define a model-driven game engineering approach, SimSYS, that supports the rapid development of serious educational games across diverse educational topics. Here, we present our approach for modeling serious educational games, using tailored UML use cases (visual UML diagram and detailed tabular specifications). The tailored approach integrates features of storyboarding techniques (well-established in the game community), with use case modeling (well-established in the software engineering community). The use case model can be transformed into a formal XML representation that can be loaded by the SimSYS Game Play Engine. Part of a game on agile software development process is used for illustration.