Dottorato in INGEGNERIA INFORMATICA

Titolo della tesi: Pedagogically-driven gamed esign for engaging and educating players

Games are an interactive medium that has demonstrated extraordinary potential beyond the use of entertainment. Given their interactive nature, games afford experiences where players can learn, practice their skills, and learn from failure in a real-time environment. To this end, this research explores several key areas relating to the ongoing development of games for pedagogical purposes, how traditional game design principles can still be used to develop games for educational games without the games resulting in an interactive version of traditional assessment, and more importantly how educational games can be developed to be aesthetically and practically on par with commercial games for entertainment. Therefore, three projects were developed that explored varying levels of concentrated educational content: GEA 2: A new Earth was a fully immersive educational experience based on in-class curriculum content. Another Week at the Office (AWATO) was an interactive game that provided a way for players to improve their understanding about cybersecurity-related issues and threat classification; and lastly, Gaeta: The Great Adventure was a game that was based on real historical periods with the intention of educating users through game play with no intended purpose of assessment. Therefore, these three experiences explore how educational game design changes depending on the degree of knowledge (including assessment) that the player is expected to take away/gain from interacting with the experience and how game designers should consider an educationally driven approach developing on how concentrated the educational aspect of the game should be.