Towards Didactics-Driven Development of Educational Games

Educational games offer an effective means to enhance interactive learning experiences. However, developing high quality educational games is difficult. In particular, integrating didactic goals into a game's design, and verifying the learning outcomes is a complex iterative process. Due to a lack of control over these concerns, fully developed games may lack the intended educational value. We aim to improve educational game development by structuring and partly automating this process. We propose Didactics-Driven Development, a novel framework for keeping didactic goals and concerns in focus throughout the development process. By making didactic concerns explicit, it enables testing interaction patterns against opportunities for learning. We discuss how the approach has been applied to three case studies and how this has informed ongoing development of the framework.