Design and evaluation of the educational game DOGeometry: a case study

Educational games have the potential to engage students deeply with a particular topic, because they allow children to actively participate in the learning process rather than just being passive observers. However, the design of educational games can be challenging because serious objectives have to be brought in line with a satisfying gameplay experience. Furthermore, great care has to be taken that the usability of the game does not interfere with the underlying educational goals. This paper discusses the design of DOGeometry, a learning game which combines problem-solving tasks with artistic expression to teach elementary school children the basics of geometric transformations. We evaluated the game design by observing children and automatically logging all user events and report the insights which we gained from analyzing the gathered data not only by statistical means but also through visualizations of gameplay data. The visualizations proved to be extremely helpful to look behind the numbers and to explore the player behavior in more detail.