Edutainment and serious games - The designing of a theoretical application model for games with pedagogical purposes directed to upper secondary school, with the student in focus.

In this work we’ve been focusing on how to adjust educational computer games in order to make them suited for the educational context of upper secondary school. Our opinion and entrance to the study is that the related developers of the subject, in some ways, have failed to successfully combine and find the balance between the entertaining and pedagogical aspects in the games. Our main questions is which aspects in the games game developers need to take in consideration to satisfy the pupils, but also what qualities that is needed for them to function in their educational context. In order to do that we had to investigate the people of the target groups own perspective on what technological and social aspects in the computer games they assess as important. The teachers and game developers thoughts and experience of the phenomenon are also concerned as important to reach our purpose and main goal with this study; to structure a theoretical application model for educational computer games. The first thing we discussed and regarded as important was what aspects in the computer games of today that fascinate the pupils in the target group. To become more aware of this we designed a quantitative survey, where we asked the students different questions regarding this subject. Further on we also did a qualitative investigation, where we via face-to-face interviews with four teachers and two game developers asked more about what qualities they experienced and related to as important for games to fit into an educational context. The previous research on the subject as well as relevant curriculums has been taken into consideration throughout the design process. The result from the quantitative survey confirmed our hypothesis regarding the pupil’s attitude and how they feel about using computer games within an educational context. The survey in speaking also showed us a several interesting and important aspects, technological as well as social, in some of which we also could relate and connect to in the qualitative part of the studies we did