Learning with the Body

In recent years, embodiment—the notion that cognition arises not just from the mind, but also through our bodies’ physical and social interactions with the world around us—has become an important concept to enhance the design of educational games and simulations within communities such as Human–Computer Interaction (HCI), games, and learning science. However, the broad number of academic domains that define and operationalize embodiment differently has often led researchers and designers to employ a black box of design decisions—resulting in a substantial breadth of seemingly unrelated educational systems. This inconsistent application of embodiment is a substantial drawback when trying to design embodied technology to support particular use cases such as learning, and ultimately becomes problematic when trying to critically evaluate the usage and effectiveness of embodiment within existing educational designs. In this chapter, we present our work toward opening the black box of embodied design decisions by combining differing conceptual and design approaches for embodied learning games and simulations into a unified taxonomical design framework. We describe the motivation and creation process for the framework, explain its dimensions, and provide examples of its use. Ultimately, such a framework helps to explicate high-level design decisions by providing a unifying foundation for the description and categorization of embodied learning systems, and encourages new designs by identifying problematic design spaces and unexplored research/design terrain. Our design framework will benefit educational game designers and researchers by mapping out a more precise understanding of how to incorporate embodiment into the design of educational games and simulations.