ENG 225 Rhetoric and Gaming

Giannakos provides examples of design methodologies for mathematics education in games. The following is my annotation of the paper. This article establishes a system of design rules that create simultaneously educational and serious video games then provides examples of games designed with these methodologies in mind. It uses a wide array of papers related to serious video game design to arrive at the conclusion of 4 different design principles. For serious games to succeed in mathematics education, they must: 1) engage students with a narrative. 2) engage students with familiar game mechanics. 3) allow error to be an opportunity to try again. 4) engage students with collaborative learning. While the experts behind this paper performed no experiment or meta-analysis, they implemented its design rules in a series of games based off of classic video game titles. They first designed a game with narrative that was based off of side scroller video games. Then, they developed a dif...

Backlund, P., & Hendrix, M. (2013). Educational games - Are they worth the effort? A literature survey of the effectiveness of serious games. 2013 5th International Conference on Games and Virtual Worlds for Serious Applications (VS-GAMES). https://search-proquest-com.unco.idm.oclc.org/docview/304838683?accountid=12832 doi:10.1109/vs-games.2013.6624226 This article discusses the educational effectiveness of game based education, as well as what methods need to go into development of educational and serious games. It defines the differences between Serious games and edutaining games, as well as which aspects of education lend themselves best to game-based learning, such as Mathematics and language learning. This paper is focused on educational games, and was carried out using the frame established by the EduGameLab. The study was limited to games used in formal school settings, and only includes papers  published in scientific journals. Their survey of the research covered...