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. The research outlined in this proposal looks to rigorously understand how engagement is generated during video gameplay and how this can be applied to encourage engagement within an educational context. The focus is on understanding how different forms of game feedback can influence the antecedents of engagement for different game player characteristics across different stages of gameplay. A major and novel contribution of this research will be the development of a Tool to Enhance Educational Game Engagement (TEEGE) that will provide instructors and designers with a mechanism to encourage engagement with educational games by appropriately matching feedback with individual characteristics at different stages of gameplay. Consequently, specific and empirically-validated guidelines (which are currently lacking) will be proposed to help developers design educational games that encourage engagement amongst students.