CAN FUN AND PURPOSE COEXIST IN A LEARNING GAME? A CASE STUDY OF A NOVEL GEOMETRY LEARNING GAME

Motivation:
Purposeful (or serious) games are designed to achieve a purpose other than the self-contained aim of (playing) the game. Games can be designed to serve the purpose of behaviour change, learning, information dissemination or problem solving. Designers of purposeful games intend to achieve these purposes while keeping the element of entertainment intact. There is an ongoing debate on whether entertainment and purpose coexist in a game. We intend to analyse the interplay between the two seemingly contradicting aspects of a novel game named ‘Entangle’ as case study.

Idea:
Entangle is an educational board game that we designed with a purpose to educate students of middle school in basic geometry. The game is about creating angles and shapes using matchsticks and identifying them as they get entangled within each other. We intend to find out which aspects of the game dominate during the game play - fun aspects (elements of the game that make the game entertaining such as use of dice which brings an element of luck) or the didactic aspects (elements that make learning possible such as identification and memorization of shapes). Initial play testing gives us an indication that both the aspects are balanced in our game and this study is to formally evaluate the same.

Method:
We hypothesize that purpose and fun aspects are balanced in the design of Entangle. We designed an experiment to test the hypothesis and we will generate results over the next 2 to 3 weeks. The research design involves testing this hypothesis using a mixed method research. Children from middle school are asked to play the game, followed immediately by a Likert-based questionnaire to rate the two sets of elements (fun and didactic) listed by the designers. We further follow-up with semi-structured interview regarding their choices and overall feeling about the game.

Contribution:
The findings will give us a clearer picture to whether the two categories of fun and didactic elements are contradicting each other or they can successfully coexist. The results will also be helpful in identifying which of the elements in both categories get translated successfully from design. This will give useful insights on improvement of purposeful game design. We will conclude by reflecting on the results in the context of existing literature on evaluating purposeful games and discuss the generalizability of our findings over some of the popular contemporary learning games.