The Design Principles for Flow Experience in Educational Games

TLDR

Educational games must be well designed to incorporate learner engagement, a key component of educational effectiveness, and flow theory provides a foundational framework for such engagement. This article introduces a flow framework that delineates the building blocks of flow experience for designing appealing and effective educational games in formal and informal learning contexts, and clarifies its relation to immersion. The framework is grounded in associative, cognitive, and situative learning theories, integrating engagement and pedagogic elements with a focus on feedback and flow principles. Testing the framework in the RealGame business simulation revealed high student flow experience, with sense of control, clear goals, challenge‑skill, rewarding experience, and feedback dimensions scoring highly, demonstrating the framework’s usefulness for studying game‑based learning.

Abstract

Educational games have to be well designed to incorporate learner engagement, an integral component of educational effectiveness. One foundation of designing educational engagement is flow theory. This article presents a flow framework that describes the building blocks of flow experience that can be used to design appealing and effective educational games for formal and informal learning contexts. The framework provides the principles for good educational game design, based upon associative, cognitive and situative learning theories, including engagement and pedagogic elements with a focus upon feedback and flow principles. Furthermore, the paper clarifies the relation between the flow experience and immersion. We tested the flow framework in the RealGame case study, which revealed that the RealGame business simulation game was well designed and effective at engaging students. We found that the university students' flow experience in the game was high and the findings indicated that sense of control, clear goals and challenge-skill dimensions of flow scored the highest, but a rewarding experience and feedback dimensions also scored highly by the students. Overall, the results indicate that flow framework is a useful tool in studying game-based learning experiences.