Designing and Evaluating Engaging Interfaces for Educational Games

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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.