Concealing education into games

Although educational games become an upcoming trend, their effectiveness, reusability and entertainment factor remain a challenge. Merging entertainment with education is a major issue as the game must not get in the zone of homework or else it will lose its enjoyable nature. Consequently, the user/student must not engage consciously into the learning process but through an indirect captivating course which will contain the educational elements that are required for his/her learning experience. These elements consist of educational material that an instructor wants to furnish the students, as well as techniques which the instructor will use in order to teach the subject. More accurately, educational techniques are based on pedagogical patterns described by pedagogues, child psychologists etc. In light of the above, the present work distinguishes four main roles in the creation of an educational game (a) the educational expert (pedagogue, psychologist etc.) who will provide the educational theories and instructional patterns,(b) the game designer or more generally the game industry (consisting of game artists, scenarists, audio editors etc.) who will provide games that follow the mindset of the given educational theories/patterns and render a customizable game prototype while maintaining its ludic and exciting manner, (c) the instructor who, in most cases with no game development experience, will integrate the educational content and customize the game to suit the class profile and (d) the learner who will use the games to enhance his learning experience. In this paper, we present the challenges of creating ludic and serious educational games, by means of cooperation between different domains such as game designers and educational experts. Based on the state of the art for educational game authoring tools we propose a collaborative authoring tool in which each role has a dedicated purpose and a suite of tools under a common information space.