Collaborative Learning Through Games – Characteristics , Model , and Taxonomy

— Educational games have been around for some time, but there are still many areas that need to be explored. One of the main challenges when developing educational games is that the highest educational value is gained from games developed for one specific subject. Such games are very expensive to develop and they cannot be reused in others subjects. In this paper, we suggest to utilize collaborative gameplay to improve the learning capabilities of educational games for more than one subject. More specific, we search for the answer to the following three research questions: which properties characterize a good educational game; how can collaboration improve learning in educational games; and how to classify educational games that also can take the multiplayer aspect into account? The results presented are based on analysis of previous research on educational games as well as our own experiences from developing a multiplayer educational game. The contribution of this paper is a characterization of what makes good educational games, a theoretical model for how collaboration can improve learning in games, and the Lecture Games taxonomy of educational games.