Call for educational game design patterns

In spite of increased interest in game-based learning, the development of educational game design methods has been insignificant. Apparently, this lack has negatively influenced the quality of published educational games and the diffusion of game based learning. One of the biggest problems of educational games has been the inadequate integration of educational and game design principles. Furthermore,  it is common that the multidisciplinary nature of the design teams also arouses problems – there are too many chief cooks with their own recipes without having a common language to collaboratively mix the masterpiece. Good educational games just do not get cooked by merely hiring game designers and instructional designers for the game design team. A shared vocabulary and an understanding of how the instructional designers’ and the game designers’ work aligns and synergizes would facilitate the development of high quality educational games.

As a solution, I have proposed a  pattern-based approach that supports the design, analysis and comparison of educational games. Educational game design patterns that extend existing entertainment game design patterns are descriptions of commonly reoccurring parts of the design of a educational game that concern and optimize gameplay from an educational perspective.

The aim of this post is to awaken the educational game community to approach educational game design more structurally and to motivate them to participate in creation of design patterns. The current patterns are presented in educational game design pattern library:

http://www.pori.tut.fi/~krikii/patterns/.

In the same page you can propose patterns to be included in the library.

In addition, I will publish here a short description of each pattern in order to collect feedback about them and facilitate discussion about patterns.