Um ambiente de autoria de jogos educacionais epistêmicos

Abstract

The development of a good game requires from the author - besides the expertise of the subject - to understand the target audience, to be able to produce an art appropriate to the proposal and have knowledge in game design. Even more relevant are the requirements for educational games and instructional design, where the poor choice of the game’s educational content, may, in addition to mischaracterizing a game, not achieve the expected educational objectives. This paper presents a proposal of an authoring environment for educational games based on the general concepts of game design and the Epistemic Games theory as a basis for the development of educational games. This theory presents the concept of Epistemic Frames, which describes the process of making a snip of a culture, environment, activities and tools that make up a profession. The organization of these to make sense as an educational activity and the expected learning in a context other than which the participants are used. The process of transforming the snippet into a game results in the Epistemic Game, therefore, it is not limited to the instructional design, but also to the planning of the components to be defined in the game design. The proposed authoring environment was divided into three applications, following the client server model with an internal structure organized by modules and base. The base dictates behavioral to the modules by establishing communication with each other. The functionalities of the environment were obtained from analyzes of theory, epistemic games produced, other existing environments and game design. Each module can represent an activity through an object or character, in the case of epistemic games, the activities of a profession snippet. The end result is an environment capable of generating epistemic games in a simpler and cheaper way, not requiring from the author programming knowledge by simplifying his access to technological resources such as game engine and development environment at the cost of creative freedom for the production of a game that follows the model of epistemic games.