A laboratory for developing digital educational games
Digital educational games are popular, but complex to develop. Professors Jaccard and Sanchez have developed a digital platform that facilitates collaboration in their design, use and evaluation.
Digital educational games are recognised as effective and engaging learning tools. However, in order to develop their full potential, there are some challenges to overcome, particularly regarding collaboration between teachers, game developers and educational researchers. Teachers have difficulties finding games adapted to their educational goals. Designers are looking for ways to meet teachers' expectations by integrating knowledge from education sciences, and researchers are struggling to find games that provide appropriate data to evaluate their effectiveness in education.
As part of NRP 77, Professors Dominique Jaccard from the Media Engineering Institute in Yverdon and Eric Sanchez from the University of Geneva have tried to find a solution.
Their research has led to the creation of a methodological framework that includes guidelines, tools and recommendations to facilitate the design, development and evaluation of digital educational games. Interested individuals can find out more about this methodology, which is called “co.LAB”, at https://www.colab-project.ch.
The "co.LAB Serious Games Design Framework" is available online and offers, for example, a structured and comprehensive view of how games are designed. This schematic representation allows the people involved to focus more closely on specific aspects of the design (for example, the instructional engineers design the learning scenario while the graphic designers work on the user interfaces), while also providing an overview of the relationships between these different elements.
Other findings of the research project include various guidelines and recommendations regarding the multidisciplinary conception, development and evaluation of educational games. They can be viewed here on the project website: https://www.colab-project.ch.
Significance for policy and practice
The methods and tools provided are adaptable to practices and objectives at different educational levels, from primary school to university or vocational training. The co.LAB collaborative platform can also be useful for formalising a research and development process, making it suitable for designing and evaluating any type of educational resource, whether digital or not.
Three key messages
- The design, development and evaluation of educational games is a collaborative process that requires knowledge sharing between teachers, researchers and game developers. Visualisation of the research-oriented design methodology (ROC) facilitates collaboration and knowledge sharing.
- Collaborative digital tools can facilitate collaboration within multidisciplinary teams working on the development of digital educational games or other educational resources.
- Development of collaborative research in the design and evaluation of digital educational resources requires facilitation and institutionalisation of collaboration between teachers and science.
This research project is one of 46 projects of National Research Programme NRP 77 on the topic of "Digital Transformation". You can find an overview of the projects here: Project overview
You can find the background and objectives of this research programme headed by Prof. Dominique Jaccard on the NRP 77 website:
A digital laboratory for the collaborative design of digital educational games