I continue blogging on the topic of educational games: Teaching Bayesian networks by means of social scheming, or, why edugames don’t have to suck

As a part of my Master’s thesis in Computer Science, I am designing a game which seeks to teach its players a subfield of math known as Bayesian networks, hopefully in a fun and enjoyable way. This post explains some of the basic design and educational philosophy behind the game, and will hopefully also convince you that educational games don’t have to suck.

I will start by discussing a simple-but-rather-abstract math problem and look at some ways by which people have tried to make math problems more interesting. Then I will consider some of the reasons why the most-commonly used ways of making them interesting are failures, look at the things that make the problems in entertainment games interesting and the problems in most edutainment games uninteresting, and finally talk about how to actually make a good educational game. I’ll also talk a bit about how I’ll try to make the math concerning Bayesian networks relevant and interesting in my game, while a later post will elaborate more on the design of the game.