Towards a Constructionist Serious Game Engine

Abstract

Game developers have been using commercial game engines to create serious games. The development of serious game is a process that requires game and instructional design. Constructionist environments and games are becoming more popular in the last years because of the importance of Computational Thinking to develop problem solving skills. Despite this popularity, there is a lack of available game engines and frameworks to develop this kind of games. This paper proposes a game engine architecture to support the affordable development of constructionist games. The game engine specification describes components of game, instructional and constructionist elements as a low-level definition that facilitates direct implementation. A serious game built upon this specification and used by 96 students is also presented in this paper. This validation provided some future work ideas, as an editor tool, SDK and API.