Educational Video Game Design: Best Practices

Use analogies and storytelling to make great educational video games: avoid the common pitfalls of literal interpretation and learn new ways to think creatively about curriculum design through games.

How do you make an educational video game? Where do you even begin? And why are so many of these games so bad?

In this discussion, led by educational video game designer Gabe Turow Ed.M., Ed.D., we will explore a variety of common educational design pitfalls and then focus on their remedies. The process of taking a curricular goal and introducing it through a game is extremely challenging, and it takes a playful, poetic approach that can be practiced. This course is about pushing past what you think is a good initial idea, and developing it into something great.

Our discussion will center on how to convert learning goals into game ideas, the core of which, I believe, is dependent on finding playful, interesting analogies to the content under consideration. Too often people run straight at this problem and interpret content in similar ways to what they have seen before, rather than approaching it in a fundamentally new way that really uses the digital and analogue game tools at their disposal. The class itself will present an iterative educational game design process that you will be able to use: Starting with research and background material, brainstorming, storyboarding, writing, choosing a game style or type, paper and digital prototyping, modular construction of a digital game, and polishing the result.

Featured Topics

• Applying learning theory to educational videogame design
• Similarities in curriculum design and level design 
• Finding analogies and metaphors so you can present your content in a new way
• Choosing your medium: card game, board game, or videogame?
• Thinking like a musician and thinking like a programmer: using modularity
• Building a story around your content