Teaching Me Softly: Experiences and Reflections on Informal Educational Game Design

Video games are highly engaging environments. Therefore, there is a growing interest in harnessing their motivational potential via game-based learning. However, putting curricular content into digital games is not trivial. Many educational games fail to combine teaching and gameplay in a subtle way, thereby suffer from low-grade design and fail to utilise the motivational potential of video games. This article explicates some main issues of educational games and reflects on an approach to a more informal and harmonic design for educational games. Furthermore, it describes the “Eduventure II ”, a research project investigating and testing these methods. The game developed in this prototype links the curriculum to narrative, simulation and game play layers. The here presented text describes the theoretical background, issues, concept and implementation of the prototype, as well as the lessons learnt from a pedagogical perspective.