Abstract:
Educational games can play a significant role in making learning fun, interactive and amenable to current generation. In the mix of conventional methods such as classroom learning and emerging methods such as online videos, games offer a unique proposition due to the element of play, which creates a motivation to learn. However, games are yet to fulfil their promise and become a mainstream alternative.

One of the reasons for low adoption is the design of educational games. Typically, educational games are designed by inserting educational content into an unrelated gameplay. Such exogenous designs lead to games that are neither fun nor educational. If educational games were to be just games that are voluntarily played, the act of playing and learning would be inseparable. This objective can be achieved through endogenous design, wherein the gameplay is generated from the educational content. In endogenous design, the gameplay creates a deeper connection with the content, ensuing that playing and learning thrive on each other, leading to superior motivation.

Educational games with endogenous designs are uncommon because designing such games is challenging, the efforts involved higher, and the literature offering inadequate guidance. Through our research, we attempt to develop this missing guidance in the form of strategies for endogenous design of educational games. Our approach to research is through study of design practice using protocol analysis. The identified strategies are further weaved into a design process to synthesize a framework named Endogen. The strategies and the framework for endogenous design of educational games is the core contribution of our PhD research.

The specific research questions, context and methodology of this work is yet to be finalized.

Previous Work:

Educational Game Design

Designed a game named Entangle. Entangle is an educational board game of creating angles and shapes and scoring points. It is designed for middle school for learning basic geometry.

Publications:

• Athavale, S., & Dalvi, G. (2020). Endogen – Framework for Designing Endogenous Educational Games. In Digra International Conference 2020
• Athavale, S., & Dalvi, G. (2019). Strategies for Endogenous Design of Educational Games. In Digra International Conference 2019: Game, Play And The Emerging Ludo-Mix.
• Athavale, S., & Dalvi, G. (2019). Discovering Strategies for Design of Purposeful Games—A Preliminary Study. In Research into Design for a Connected World (pp. 63-74). Springer, Singapore.
• Athavale, S., & Dalvi, G. (2018, May). A method to study purposeful game design process. In 2018 IEEE 6th International Conference on Serious Games and Applications for Health (SeGAH) (pp. 1-8). IEEE.
• Athavale, S., & Mohan, A. (2018). Understanding game ideation through the lens of creativity model. In DS 89: Proceedings of The Fifth International Conference on Design Creativity (ICDC 2018), University of Bath, Bath, UK (pp. 176-182).
• Athavale, S. (2017, October). Conceptualization of Purposeful Games. In Extended Abstracts Publication of the Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play (pp. 679-682). ACM.
• Athavale, S., & Agrawal, V. (2017, July). Bringing Game Design Models to Life. In International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (pp. 3-20). Springer, Cham.
• Athavale, S., Johry, A., & Dalvi, G. (2015). Can fun and purpose coexist in a learning game? A case study of a novel geometry learning game. In edulearn15 Proceedings (pp. 2839-2848). IATED.