16: WGE MAG
A PIECE OF CAKE? Making educational games for children
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There are thousands of minigames for children in iOS, Android and in other platforms. Adding educational value to children’s games brings a few new challenges on top of heavy competition. Children are extremely challenging audience for many reasons. Many of them can’t read or have limited reading ability. They like repetition, great stories, full colors, nice animations and surprises. But they don’t have as much patience as adults do. So they get bored very quickly. Someone said that when kids play they want to have fun, not learn. Luckily they appear not to be mutually exclusive, since children play millions of educational game sessions too. A while ago kids’ edugames were basically the same as simple ‘work & task’ books but with small animations and feedback. Then voice guidance, scoring systems and finally a real playing approach was added to edugames. Now the best educational games finally challenge some adults puzzle and even arcade games, whilst still combining educational value with great fun factor; this is by far the most challenging job when making edugames for children.
“All in all I’ve found making games for children extremely good fun. Live user tests are the best part of it even if feedback is not always so great. Children really say what they feel.” One interesting aspect related to the children’s game genre is that our end customer and buyer are different persons. A typical mommy-kid dilemma, which creates many extra issues in game development. Children love coins, prizes, scores etc. But many parents feel that games, which have been created for younger children should not have scores and should not encourage competing with other children. The same problematic is seen in customer feedback. Written feedback is often given by player’s Mom’s and statistics for the playing session can give totally opposite messages. So it is pretty critical to really study feedback carefully before making changes in game design. And an ultimatum goal is naturally to keep both player & Mom happy.