Quality Criteria for Educational Games

Abstract

The development of software products in general and educational games in particular is a very demanding process involving costly resources for long periods of time. Evaluating its quality throughout the development lifecycle contributes to the early identification of imperfections and to improved efficiency. In this paper we discuss a set of quality criteria and a method to assess the quality of educational games. These quality criteria are based on the functional requirements of the system and structured into two groups: general and specific. General criteria refer to the set of criteria that are common to all educational games in a given study area. Specific criteria refer to those criteria particularly addressing a specific educational purpose. We also present a quality model that is based on the software engineering paradigms. This model, called Quantitative Evaluation Framework, provides a quantitative measure for the quality of an educational game.

Keywords

• Game-Based Learning
• Assessment; Quantitative Evaluation; Educational Software
• Educational Games
• Quality Criteria Classification for games