The 5/10 Method: A Method for Designing Educational Games

Serious games may improve understanding, involvement, engagement, reasoning and inquiry, and have been successfully used in schools. Recent studies show that serious games are sometimes misused, and not always easy to integrate in an instructional environment. It is often unclear how a game contributes to student learning, or how it should be used in a course. This paper proposes a method to support the analysis, design, development, and use of serious games in education. The method combines the widely used design model ADDIE with the instructional design method ‘10 steps to complex learning’. The method is applied in the development of the Moth game, which supports learning optics at the level of high school physics.