What is Design Theory

The aim of this chapter is to explore two educational video games as a repository for action and meaning-making. Rixdax and El Patron feature two different game genres and designs. Through a comparative analysis, it will be shown how these two games actually address very different learning goals and also seem to miss a crucial aspect of learning: reflective action. This chapter will investigate how the layout on the screen is composed and how knowledge is represented. To do so, six structuring factors introduced by Prensky (2001), some of the organizing principles of learning design developed by Selander (Selander, 2008a-b; 2009, Selander & Åkerfeldt, 2008) and the multimodal framework developed by Kress and van Leeuween (Kress & van Leeuween, 2006; Kress, 2010; van Leeuween, 2005) are used. The chapter analyses the individual elements as semiotic resources in the educational video game and show how these elements are represented, especially from the points of view of information value, salience and framing, but also how the information is sequenced, the tempo of the games and how they accommodate meta-reflection by the users.