The role of game developers in a collaborative pedagogical game design

Recent published work suggests the importance and need for teachers and game developers to collaborate to enhance the gamified educational environment. A prior aspect of this research illustrates the teachers’ role in the design and shows the increased appreciation of the game developers’ role in the design process. This paper aims to discuss the intervention needed from game developers as part of an Agile Holistic Gamified Pedagogical Design (AH-GPD) framework. This research represents an extension of earlier published work that identified the teachers’ role in the framework. In this paper, we present the process of structuring the game developers’ role in the process, combining gamification elements and Human Computer Interaction (HCI) principles related to game design. This paper's contribution is two-fold; firstly, the process of identifying the HCI sub-elements related to gamification. Secondly, validating both gamification elements developer and the HCI from a game developers’ perception. The validation was conducted through focused interviews technique with game developers. The interview technique is utilized to solicit the game developers’ perception of an educational game and confirm the sub-elements provided to structure game developers’ input in the gamification design process. Analysis of the interview’s influenced changes of the sub-elements of the proposed framework, in which some were modified and replaced, and some new sub-elements added to the framework. Future work of this research suggests building a template that communicates the requirements to the teachers.