Designing and Evaluating Engaging Interfaces for Educational Games

学生的参与对于创造有效的学习体验很重要。然而，让数字原生的千禧一代学生参与学习正变得越来越具有挑战性。与他们沉浸在电子游戏中的世界相比，这一代人可能会觉得传统的学校和工作环境很无聊。为了应对这一日益严峻的挑战，游戏已经被引入课堂，但在满足教育目标方面却表现出好坏参半的结果。在某种程度上，这可能是由于教育游戏领域的研究工作往往专注于学习任务，而忽视了用户的游戏体验。虽然我们对娱乐游戏的吸引力有一定的了解，但这方面的研究是脱节的，而且其中的许多知识都未能进入教育领域。我们仍然可以从娱乐游戏中学到很多东西，以鼓励学生参与学习。例如，在这种情况下，反馈作为一种鼓励用户参与的潜在机制并没有得到严格的研究。类似地，虽然人们意识到吸引一个人的东西可能不会吸引另一个人，但这些个体差异还没有得到充分的研究，也没有被充分利用来增强体验。

Student engagement is important in creating effective learning experiences. However, it is becoming increasingly challenging to keep the digital-native Millennial generation of students engaged in their learning. This generation may find traditional school and work environments boring when compared to the world they immerse in through playing video games. To address this growing challenge, games have been introduced in the classroom but have shown mixed results in meeting educational objectives. In part, this may be due to the fact that research efforts in the area of educational games often focus on the learning tasks but neglect the user's gameplay experience. While there is some understanding of what may make entertainment games engaging, this research is disjointed and much of this knowledge has failed to make its way into the educational field. There is still much that can be learned from entertainment gaming to encourage engagement in student learning. For example, feedback as a potential mechanism to encourage engagement has not been rigorously studied in this context. Similarly, while there is a realization that what engages one individual may not engage another, these individual differences have not been adequately studied and leveraged to enhance experiences.