Puzzle-it: An HTML5 Serious Games Platform for Education

Serious games as learning medium have advanced in the past few years. They have been applied to support learning in various fields such as security, health-care, and education. Serious games can scale from low budget games up to high budget games depends on the games’ objectives and features. For instance, military may utilize games with 3D simulation, live characters, and extensive scenario for combat training due to its critical mission. Nonetheless, in a classroom or remote set-up learning environment, most of these high level games are impractical to be adopted due to the amount of costs they may induce. This is most of the case in educational games which main objective is to motivate the student to learn. However, a game development remains as a time consuming, complex, and laborious process. In order to simplify and shorten this process, it is highly attractive to create a platform to produce educational games. Therefore, this paper, based on our previous work, proposes a platform for authoring HTML5 serious games intended in particular, but not limited to create lightweight serious games for educational purpose using the upcoming HTML5 standard playable in common web browsers. This platform, puzzle-it, divides the work of game development into two distinct layers i.e. contents authoring and core engine development. Both readily and work in progress components of the platform are presented and discussed.