All Good Things Come in Threes: Assessing Student-Designed Games via Triadic Game Design

Game design is emerging in contemporary education, especially in constructionist curricula for student-centered and discovery learning. While previous work focused on assessing how complementary skills (e.g., computational thinking) develop through game design, few have attempted to assess the very games designed by students. Here, we show preliminary results on using the Triadic Game Design (TGD) model to assess the elements that may constitute a ”balanced” student-designed game in the context of constructionist learning. Our results show that TGD is viable to carry out such assessment. We conclude by discussing the limitations of our approach and propose directions for future work.