Pragmatic game authoring support for an adaptive Competence-Based Educational System

Educators can be encouraged to use games for their teaching, and this would likely lead them to positive results. However, while a general model for effective educational games requires the collaboration of several experts, entailing a high amount of work and interaction among them, teachers are often alone in their task of developing learning experiences. Hence, a significant research issue in TEL is the simplification of the task of developing an educational game: by “simplification” we mean that the requirements of the visual- and mechanics-related aspects of a game are left to a minimum for the teacher, while she could concentrate on the learning-related aspects of the game. In this paper we present a framework aimed to simplify the teacher’s task, through the use of game editors. In particular, we designed and implemented two editor tools, aimed to allow a teacher to produce game learning resources, while mainly focusing on the subject matter of interest, rather than on the technical development aspects. The editors allow defining games with one of two possible fixed mechanics; they produce games as HTML5 web applications, that can function standalone, or can be integrated in an adaptive e-learning platform (DEV).