What is Affordances of Instructional Media

Electronic games have the potential to support learning by doing and enhance student motivation. However, there is little guidance in the literature on how to leverage the affordances of electronic games to design effective instruction. This chapter is our effort to start to accumulate knowledge to guide the design of electronic educational games. We present a case study describing how the unique components of electronic games enabled the design of Conquest of Coastlands, a learning environment delivered as an electronic game. We describe how our team synthesized two sets of design principles from the literature on electronic games, instructional design, and intrinsic motivation and how these principles informed the design of Conquest of Coastlands. The principles and the related case study may inform the design of future electronic educational games and generate research questions to be investigated in empirical research.