Designing for Learning and Play - The Smiley Model as Framework

This paper presents a framework for designing engaging learning experiences in games – the Smiley Model. In this Design-Based Research project, student-game-designers were learning inside a gamified learning design - while designing and implementing learning goals from curriculum into the small digital games. The Smiley Model inspired and provided a scaffold or a heuristic for the overall gamified learning design –- as well as for the students’ learning game design processes when creating small games turning the learning situation into an engaging experience. The audience for the experiments was adult upper secondary general students as well as 7th grade primary school students. The intention with this article is to inspire future learning designers that would like to experiment with integrating learning and play.