Towards a Taxonomy of Instruments for Facilitated Design and Evaluation of Video Games for Education

Abstract

The focus of this paper is on the development of a taxonomy of software instruments that will facilitate the management and evaluation of the design of video games for education. For that reason, we aim to propose such a taxonomy that will be useful to users (especially to designers/creators) in the processes of the creation of educational video games. The proposed taxonomy aims to provide instruments for the facilitated straightforward design of the video games for education; facilitate the processes of creation and evaluation of specific video games for educational purposes; and facilitate non-ICT people such as educators, trainers, teachers in the game-based-learning process. We propose the following taxonomy named Taxonomy of Instruments for Management and Evaluation of the Design of Video Games for Education (TIMED-VGE). The suggested taxonomy includes various software instruments that will be a significant advantage for stakeholders of educational video games. The taxonomy includes two categories of instruments. The first category includes instruments supporting/assisting the processes of design management and its validation, and game generation. The second category presents analytics instruments for game design evaluation, monitoring, processing, analyzing and visualizing all the available data. The proposed taxonomy recommends the appropriate instruments to include in the design, development, and application of video games for education. Therefore, this taxonomy can serve as a starting point or as guidance for professionals (software developers, researchers) in the processes of creation of games and video game platforms for education. In this paper, we describe how the proposed taxonomy is applied in the APOGEE (smArt adaPtive videO GamEs for Education) software platform for the creation and monitoring of educational video games. We use the taxonomy to guide the development of the main platform instruments including both assistive and analytics instruments. The application of the proposed taxonomy in the APOGEE platform will be used to validate it. This will contribute to a better understanding of the game, rapid absorption of educational content, enhanced gaming experience, and for improving the overall game-based learning process. Thus, the taxonomy will be proved as a means for designing future software platforms for game-based learning.