Designing educational games: Key elements and methodological approach

Serious games, especially educational video games, have proliferated in recent years. Despite this, there are very few methodological proposals capable of addressing the design of all the key elements of an educational video game. To deal with this discrepancy, this paper presents a methodology divided into five phases: startup, design, production, test, and post-production; focusing on the design phase of educational games. The design phase structures an educational video game in acts, scenes, scenarios, actions and dialogues; and defines the modeling tasks and generated artifacts which have to be carried out in each step of the process.