"The Ballad of Proxima-B" is an educational RPG that promotes learning and collaboration. Students contribute to world-building and game mechanics, creating fictional worlds and characters, including a dystopian Earth, the planet Proxima-B, and alien races. The game incorporates constructivist, constructionist, and Dynamic Systems Model…

This design case details the ten-year (2014-present) iterative process to design and develop a graph-based computer-assisted program to support middle school students' development of collaborative argumentation. We begin by describing the first two iterations of the design and discuss how we learned from the process failures. This paper focuses on…

Over the past 15 years, various government agencies in Singapore have supported educational game development and research, producing multiple digital games (e.g., "Legends of Alkhemia," "Statecraft X"), and non-digital games (e.g., "Green City Blues," "Money Matters"). Although these games had been…

This design case presents a gamified dictionary learning intervention for away-from-school learning. Intended to be mobile, the game features AI speech recognition for practicing English words and phrases. We also introduce a second feature--an integrated teacher dashboard that addresses issues in traditional homework--a lack of immediate feedback…

At Play in the Cosmos is a game for University-level Astronomy courses. Designed as a collaboration between the Games + Learning + Society Center, an academic center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Norton & Company, Cosmos is intended to support a "game-first" model of curriculum in which students play the game before…

The objective of this project was to address design gaps in previous programs that address scientific argumentation in middle schools. We adopted gamification mechanics (e.g., stimulus and response and progression) to design a computer-assisted program to better support students' development of scientific argumentation. In this paper, we describe…

The PrimaryAI project focuses on developing an upper elementary integrated curriculum that covers life science, artificial intelligence (AI), and computer science concepts. The PrimaryAI curriculum uses both problem-based learning (PBL) and game-based learning (GBL) to engage students and situates the curriculum in a real-world context. The…

On Fighting Shadows (OFS) is a two-dimensional roleplaying game that tells the story of Marvin, a young adult that experiences hidden disabilities, focusing on hydrocephalus and its possible mental health implications, such as anxiety and depression. Developed with the goal of being both informational and engaging, OFS aims to increase awareness…

To combat high dropout rates and low motivation for online courses, we gamified a history of science course. To do so, we used an online educational program called 3DGameLab to convert what had been a well-liked face-to-face lecture and discussion course to an online format, for the purposes of long-distance teaching and learning. Within…

Confronting issues of global climate change will require creative approaches to energy consumption across a range of human activities. This design case looks at the evolution of a physical/digital hybrid board game that we created to encourage families to reflect on household energy consumption and environmental sustainability. Design in this…

Lost & Found is a tabletop-to-mobile game series designed for teaching medieval religious legal systems. The long-term goals of the project are to change the discourse around religious laws, such as foregrounding the prosocial aspects of religious law such as collaboration, cooperation, and communal sustainability. This design case focuses on…

Biostatistics is a second-year subject taken by Biomedical Engineering Diploma students in Temasek Polytechnic, Singapore. Gamification elements, referenced from the popular "Pokémon GO," were infused into a suite of activities. The purpose was to engage and sustain the interest of students while facilitating the successful execution of…

We designed an activity-based science curriculum that used Minecraft to support microbiology learning for students enrolled in the Lang Science Program at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City. Minecraft offered an option to consolidate complex science content into digestible activities for modeling concepts and…

This article presents two similar design cases and a discussion of how like values resulted in dissimilar design moves. Both cases were gamified learning activities for graduate students in instructional design. Both interventions employed rapid prototyping and were delivered synchronously in an at-a-distance setting. This article compares the two…

This design case includes the challenges, considerations, and decisions associated with the design, development, and delivery of a master's level educational technology course on teaching and learning with games and simulations. A master's level course, Digital Games and Simulations in the Classroom, faced redesign in order to add a gamification…