How can you incorporate educational content into your game design?

Another important question is is your learning goal teachable through a game? The best goals are systemic relationships, for example, or providing a perspective that the player might not otherwise know. Rhetorical or formal learning goals, on the other hand, do not generally translate through games as they "get in the way" of play.

This is where an understanding of Flow State really helps. When the challenge meets your player's skill level is where the Flow State can happen. But some anxiety is required to achieve actual learning. The challenge needs to be a little too much for their skill for learning to happen. Once you understand this you can start to use the nine dimensions of Deep Flow to really engage your players. -Clear Goals -Sense of Control -Immediate and Actionable Feedback -Autotelic Experience -Loss of Self-Consciousness -Time Transformation -Concentration -Merging Action-Awareness -Challenge/Skill Balance

Be aware, however, that designing for balancing challenge and support can be too much of an outside-in perspective and sometimes leads to contrary design pillars. It's generally more effective to think inside-out (such as whether a game mechanic is robust, interesting, has potential for extension) and work on its fine tuning later.

I have worked on a couple educational games, one think that would love to drive home here is that the game designer shouldn't be in charge of the educational curriculum, when creating educational games is a must to have a professional overseeing the learning outcome for the game, usually the educator presents the expected learning outcome to the game designer and together they come up with the most "fun" or engaging way to interact with the curriculum. What I did on the past is to sit down with the educator and learn how that particular person taught that topic on their classroom, and I use that as the starting point to explore game mechanics that could complement the learning outcome, usually trying to "verbalize" the learning experience.

If you want to assess learning, also think about ways to work assessment into your game system. Do you want the assessment to happen naturally as part of gameplay? Or do you want to use pauses in the game or perhaps in between game sessions to do effective assessment? This way you can more accurately test whether the learning is actually happening as a result of your game.

Motivation is a critical part of taking advantage of learning games. And every player is not equally motivated. Take a look at Self-Determination Continuum of Motivation (Deci and Ryan) to see the six dimensions of motivation: -Amotivation -Extrinsic Motivation (four levels of this) -Intrinsic Motivation Understanding this continuum can help you segment your players into motivational cohorts and help you to more effectively target each cohort for maximum learning potential.

Avoid “brocolate”. Hiding quizzes in a game mechanic that has nothing to do with the learning goals is like hiding brocoli in chocolate. It is not playful learning. Games are intrinsically about learning. Mastering player skills in an engaging meaningful way. Understand what skills are required to perform the fun part of the mechanic. Make that a transferable skill. This is true playful learning.

Be honest about scope and partnerships. Scope: One of the unfortunate truths of working in games in the educational space is that the available budgets are on the small side, and teams often considerably over-scope what they want to do. This means the resulting games are often poorly developed and incoherent. Partnerships: The other unfortunate truth is that many of the institutions funding educational content are only really aware of their pedagogical and rhetorical goals associated with the project. They usually know very little about game design or development, and many assume that adding any game into education is a magic formula that just works. This is not true, and risks setting projects up on faulty premises that lead to failure.