Challenges in the Development and Evaluation of Immersive Digital Educational Games

In this paper, we describe a conceptual framework and address the related issues and solutions in the identification of three major challenges for the development and evaluation of Immersive Digital Educational Games (IDEGs). These challenges are (i) advancing adaptive educational technologies to shape learning experience, ensuring the individualization of learning experiences, adaptation to personal aims, needs, abilities and prerequisites; (ii) providing technological approaches to reduce the development costs for IDEGs; by enabling the creation of entirely different stories and games for a variety of different learning domains, each based, more or less, on the same pool of story units; patterns and structures; (iii) developing robust evaluation methodologies for IDEGs by the extension of ISO 9241 to include user satisfaction, motivation and learning progress and other User Experience (UX) attributes. While our research and development is by no means concluded, we believe that we have arrived at a stage where conclusions may be drawn, which will be of considerable use to other researchers in this domain.