Designing an Educational Game: Design Principles from a Holistic Perspective

When designing games with learning purposes used in a classroom, there often occur problems about the lack of learning content or the lack of game contents. Other disadvantages of existing educational games are the difficulty to provide a continual balance between the challenge and the pupils’ skill to control and solve the given task. In this paper we suggest three different perspectives that need to be communicated across in order to design a useful educational game: teachers, pupils and game designers. It is our intention with this paper to suggest some design principles for educational games, and to integrate teachers, pupils and game designers needs and requirements. To set up these design principles for educational games we have used a holistic perspective. This means that the design principles must be seen in coherence within the social and physical environment. The design principles relate to the world in which the game is going to be used. This involves integration of thinking, feelings, perceiving, behaving, culture and context from game designers, teachers and pupils. The most important point in developing design principles for educational games may be that good games engage both pupils and teachers, and the interplay between game play, pupils and teachers creates some dynamic learning opportunities.