Completing the Experience: Debriefing in Experiential Educational Games

Good educational game design is about providing an engaging experience for learners. Experiential training games have been used in fields such as medicine, business, outdoor adventures and military operations for decades. Research from these fields demonstrates the importance of including debriefing activities to help the learners consider what was learned and how that learning can be connected to previous learning and experiences in their lives. Most educational games do not include debriefing activities. The purpose of this paper is to explore some of these models of debriefing and to present a variety of methods that educational software creators can use to include debriefing in their experiential educational games