What Makes a Good Learning Game?
What Makes a Good Learning Game?
What Makes a Good Learning Game?
By Simon Egenfeldt-Nielsen
February 2011
Summary
Such games have been criticized for failing to integrate the learning experience and game experience while lacking intrinsic motivation, which is a crucial part of a successful computer game.
The path to answering the question "What is a good learning games?" requires that we dig a little deeper into the concepts of games and learning.
This is a crucial distinction to understand not only what makes a game a game, but what makes it good.
When we design learning games we should therefore be very focused on how the rules in the games works, because they define the core of the game experience, and ultimately the primary learning results.
A lot of the elements present in a good game relate to a good learning game.
So What Makes a Good Learning Game? If we combine the above understanding of verbs and substantives with the criticisms leveled earlier at edutainment we can better appreciate what makes for a good learning games.
IntegrationWhen you play a learning game you need to make sure that learning and play are integrated.
A good learning game succeeds when it does not become void of meaning, when there is motivation.
The threshold for how good a learning game should be needs to be defined in relation to context.
Hopefully the above has outlined a framework for analyzing and evaluating what makes for a good learning game.
Reference
Egenfeldt-Nielsen , S. (2011, February). elearn Magazine: What Makes a Good Learning Game? Retrieved March 30, 2020, from https://elearnmag.acm.org/archive.cfm?aid=1943210