Abstract:

Educational videogames have become a new learning tool. However it is very difficult to do an accurate assessment of them in order to select those good educational videogames that have been launched into the market. Using as a reference the entertainment videogame media analysis published in specialized magazines, huge rating differences of the same product have been found due to unspecific assessment criteria, something that leads to personal interpretation and makes very difficult a comparison among videogames.

This paper is a brief review of the development of a rubric made up of 15 items with 4 levels. Different evaluation systems have been reviewed, on the search process, in order to look for clear and objective items that could be used for our goal. Taking on account these evaluation systems we extracted the items that could be used within any kind of educational videogame, and that could produce an objective result no matter what genre or target age was the videogame.

In order to analyze the usefulness of this rubric, it has been used by 6 professional Spanish videogame reviewers, who evaluated 4 educational videogames with different educational topics. The rubric and the results are presented in this paper and show a good accuracy in the assessment system according to the experts criteria.

Keywords:

Videogames, educational videogames, videogames assessment, videogames rating, videogames review, rubric.