Impact of Serious Game Design Factors and Problem based Pedagogy on Learning outcome

Abstract

Serious Games encompasses a wide range of goals including social awareness, public health initiatives, marketing, communications, industry, and so on but their primary concern is Education and training. These games intend to teach subject to players more than just emphasizing players' amusement and entertainment. The primary objective is to teach and train players in a playful environment. Games are too often developed in an ad-hoc manner while overlooking the use of pedagogical aspects and active learning principles. In this paper, we aim to address this issue by designing a serious game design model using Problem-based learning pedagogical aspects to assist the serious game designer. For this purpose, we mapped the problem-based learning principles with the game design factors and proposed a game design model based on 13 identified factors that are Goal, Scenario Exposition, autonomous, Control, Immersion, Challenge, Stimulus, Collaboration, Feedback, Authentic Learning, and Assessment. Followed by that, two experimental studies were conducted. First study was conducted to measure the impact of problem-based pedagogical game design factors on the learning outcome using an open source game that was customized based on the proposed model. The second study was conducted to check the impact of Collaboration and feedback on learning outcome. The results of the study reveal (1) problem based pedagogical mapped game design factors have a positive impact on the learning outcome of students and (2) procedural feedback to be the contributing factor in enhancing student performance.