A Model Driven Serious Games Development Approach for Game-based Learning

Computer games, predominantly a form of interactive entertainment, are having some success being repurposed for educational use. However, this approach is hindered by the lack of availability of experience in serious games tools. Much research is already underway to address this challenge, with some who choose to use readily available commercial-off-the-shelf games and others attempted to develop serious games in-house or collaboratively with industry expertise. These approaches present issues including educational appropriateness of the serious game content and its activities, reliability of serious games developed and the (often high) financial cost involved. Developments in software engineering that enable automatic generation of software artefacts through modelling or Model Driven Engineering (MDE) promises new hope for game-based learning adopters, especially those with little or no technical knowledge, to produce their own serious games for use in game-based learning. In this article, we present our model-driven approach to aid non-technical domain experts in serious games production for use in games-based learning.