Canadian Network for Innovation in Education

Video games are interactive by nature—people proceed in games by doing things, and this experiential quality lies at the very core of game design. Without interaction, it isn’t a game. Video games are popular precisely because of the experience—games designed for learning can do no less. However, to be feasible for use in formal educational settings, they must do more, and while we are making progress studying games in classrooms, there remain few structured approaches to analysing games that do not include classroom testing.

This presentation will outline the author’s Four Pillars of Game-Based Learning and show examples of how they can be used to perform a structured analysis of both COTS and serious games to assess whether or not a game has potential for use in the classroom.

These four pillars are:

1.  Gameplay - How is it as a game? Is it fun? Is it Interesting? How does it measure up esthetically?
2. Educational Content - Are there one or more recognizable educational objectives, discernible either from the game itself or from the accompanying support materials.
3. Teacher Support - Is there adequate teacher support to make it viable for use in a formal setting?
4. Balance - This section examines the game through the lens of the Magic Bullet model to see how well the various learning elements are balanced.

Together these four pillars highlight the key issues associated with the use of games in the classroom.