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Designing effective educational games - a case study of a project management game

This paper addresses the issues of designing effective educational games. We aim at investigating how the cognitive, behavioral and emotional aspects of the games influence their educational effectiveness. The results were obtained with an observational user experience study extended with affect analysis carried out for a project management game GraPM. We analyzed the players' understanding of the game mechanics and logic, their engagement and emotional state. Then we confronted it with the educational effects achieved. In this case study the key identified factors of educational effectiveness were: understanding game mechanics, player's engagement, and feeling of control. Invoking other desired emotions was not required for effective education, which was also generally unrelated to the player's initial knowledge.