Strategies for Endogenous Design of Educational Games

This study addresses a gap in educational game design research: while existing literature offers broad mapping frameworks, it provides few concrete strategies for embedding educational content directly into gameplay mechanics. Using Design Based Research combined with think-aloud protocol analysis, the authors set out to extract the tacit knowledge that experienced designers apply when building educational games from the content outward. Their data came from twelve in-situ design sessions covering six middle-school topics for grades 6 through 9, with content categorized according to Krathwohl's factual, conceptual, and procedural knowledge types. Nine of ten completed studies met evaluation criteria, and coding reached saturation after nine studies, though the authors caution that this saturation may partly reflect the homogeneous cultural background of their participants.

Analysis of ten designers, spanning novices and experts, yielded roughly 45 codes organized into six strategy categories: content exploration, core ideation, translation, learning integration, game detailing, and meta-strategies. Several patterns stand out. Novices tended toward original design approaches, whereas experts favored structural similarity to existing game systems. Mechanics emerged as the most common anchor for content, and designers more often aimed to activate prior knowledge than to introduce entirely new knowledge. The authors also argue that endogeneity is a matter of degree rather than a binary property, and that designers frequently fall back on exogenous mechanics when they cannot derive an endogenous opposition mechanic from the content itself.

The paper consolidates these findings into a proposed strategy system, introducing new approaches such as a discovery checklist and a verb elicitation method for generating mechanics. Certain strategies, including content-centric concept emergence and forward fitting, appeared more reliably associated with endogenous designs than others, such as drawing on known gameplay. A worked example on rock formation for ages 11 to 14 demonstrates how content, audience, and mechanics can be unified into a single game concept. The authors are explicit that these strategies represent early, qualitative guidance, since the study involved a small sample, a single three-hour conceptualization session, and individual rather than group design, with no playable prototypes tested.