Game Network Learning Environment Design Research

Play is our nature. Computer games are today an important part of most children's leisure lives and increasingly an important part of our culture as a whole. Skills developed through game playing, and playing often involves gamers into Flow state. We should turn away from attempting to explore what the features of games are that might provide interest and motivation for young people to learn. For play is the wonderful way of learning, we may recognize that we need to provide a range of different playful environments for different groups of learners.In the thesis, we explore features of games and motivations of playing, then educational values of games emerged from the research. Case study on The Return of the Incredible Machine: Contraptions, we explore its charming factors, including interface design, game process, intrinsic feedback, HELP features, collaboration model, and environments setting. From this study, we discover some valuable concepts of learning environments design. While literature review on media culture, Net generation, playing state, learning theories provide theoretic infrastructure to design playful learning environments. Finally, we conclude several points that will guide our design and assess playful learning environments, future work included.