The Effectiveness of Educational Games

Educational games for children have been widely used in supporting learning in-side and out of school and a growing interest have appeared for the potential of digital games to deliver effective and engaging learning experiences [8]. There is a variety of computer games and software that intend to assist users to achieve various educational goals. Well-known educational software is the project Scratch from MIT Media Lab [9], a programming language for learning to code. With Scratch users can program their own interactive stories, games and animations by putting together images, music and sounds with programming command blocks. It is a desktop application with an online community where children can share their creations with other people all over the world. Apart from children, educators also have included Scratch activities in a wide range of learning environments. Monterrat et al [10] in their study claimed that game moding as an educational activity could be interesting not only to learn programming but for any kind of learning. Their pedagogical tool allows people without game design skills to modify and share digital games. It allows a learner to become a teacher by designing an educational game that others can use to learn. Their main assumption is that if learning a game helps students to acquire the knowledge then be able to change the game can provide students with the ability to deeply learn the content.

Narrative architecture and ludic design are two major approaches in contemporary video game theory. They both also play an important role in teaching and learning as a part of an educational game. Lester et al. [11] described the design issues and the empirical findings about motivation in narrative-centered learning e...

... middle of paper ...

...embedding interactive narrative in multimodal learning environments for social skill improvement of children with ASC. Castelhano et al. [21] studied therapeutic activities for children with developmental disabilities with the use of multisensory stimulation environments and documented its perception concerning ludic content, play and the computer-mediated ludic activity. The main theme that emerged from their study regarding playfulness was that the computer-mediated ludic experience is perceived as useful for intervention.

In general, educational computer games for children that combine ludology and narratology can provide an effective and engaging learning experience. Hence, devel-oping learning environments that are both story-telling and play-base by combining narrative and ludic may empower children to achieve great impact, improve deficits and gain new skills