Engineering an Open-Web Educational Game Design Environment

Educational game design environments have long been employed as an engaging medium for teaching computer programming and software engineering concepts such as objects, agents, instances, behavior, and interaction. However, in contrast to the collaborative nature of programming, in particular among novice programmers, existing game design environments are solitary desktop-based applications with no or very limited support for sharing and collaboration. We have taken advantage of Web 2.0 technologies and its participative culture to develop a collaborative platform around game design activities that encourages social learning and integrates into the students´ online social presence and lifestyle. We have employed open-Web technologies to build a game design environment using only HTML5 and JavaScript that lets users practice the game design and programming activities right inside their browser. Game design and game playing run on the client while an associated website hosts the created games and supports collaboration. This paper reports on the design, implementation, and evaluation of the game design environment. The preliminary evaluation of Agent Web´s usability and performance demonstrates that not only does Agent Web meet its design goals, but also that the current Web is a hospitable environment for end-user game programming both on desktop and mobile devices.