This article considers game design research in educational settings. Its focus is on how undergraduate students -- particularly engineering students -- learn computer game design. From observations conducted during our game design courses we have developed a model of expanded game design space. It encapsulates the entire development process from…

An essential difficulty in solving practical problems that are not like the ones a student has solved before is discerning the core of the problem. It is claimed that discernment has to be trained by variation--by varying the context of the assignments in which students have to identify and grasp their "underlying form". A decisive…