Principles and Signatures in Serious Games for Science Education

Abstract

The World Wide Web Instructional Committee at North Dakota State University has developed a number of serious games aimed at science education. Their games are all multiuser, with a role-based orientation, promoting a task-and-goal cultural awareness. Constructed in collaboration with content experts, these games were developed under a proven set of design guidelines (design principles and signature elements) that serve to preserve consistency among the applications. As a consequence of this high-concept design constraint, their systems share important cognitive and pedagogical features that assist players in learning the serious game content while also allowing for consistent evaluation of learning outcomes across games. The authors have formatively evaluated these games and found them to be effective. It is now their hope that by sharing their design guidelines, others may be able to use and evaluate them to their advantage. The authors continue to develop and refine these design principles and signature elements through basic and evaluative research.