Topological Approach of Learning Games for Game Design Assistances – TALE4GDA

The design of learning games for learning is a complex task. It involves a large number of challenges for the different stakeholders (e.g. institutions, teachers, technical designers, players, video game experts). Among these challenges, we can note the acculturation to the game, the difficulty to align pedagogical concepts with the game mechanics and diegesis, or the specific needs of communities of practice. Consequently, we observe in the TEL community a strong ad hoc aspect of the design of serious games, especially regarding the game elements used to address specific pedagogical intentions. However, this ad hoc character does not allow to capitalize efficiently on both the serious games created, nor the choices between pedagogical intentions and game elements to implement them. The expertise of the whole community is then difficult to share and to reuse, and it is difficult to efficiently assist the actors in this design stage.
The goal of the TALE4GDA project is to bring new assistance to the stakeholders in the design of learning games and to allow the capitalization of these experiences. To do so, we will propose a first formalization of the concept of alignment between a game entity and a pedagogical intention - a pedago-ludic alignment. This will allow us to propose the first topology of shareable alignments: each alignment will be characterized by its relations with the others (e.g. proximity, overlap). We will take a pioneering approach by allowing the annotation of these alignments in a controlled way, exploring even the possibility of exemplifying them with real situations. Thanks to this, we will be able to set up innovative mechanisms for decision support, design and capitalization based on automatic semantic and topological reasoning.