Thanks for coming - now let us tell you why you're here

The pervasiveness of mobile devices has driven new innovations of electronic games for mobile environment (Vee Senap & Ibrahim, 2019). And as such, mobile educational games have exploded in both popularity and ubiquity. Duolingo is worth $700million (Buchanan, 2018), and “according to the industry analyst firm Metaari's most recent Global Game-Based Learning Market report, the game-based learning industry will amount to over $17 billion by 2023” (Valentine, 2018).

Eric Klopfer asks, in a piece for the MIT Press, “What is ‘educational’? And what is a ‘game’?” (2008). Educational is quite self evident, but for the latter question a loose working definition can be seen as “anything that the participants will let us get away with calling a game” (Klopfer, 2008). Though perhaps a more academic offering would be that a game is a “purposeful, goal-oriented, rule-based activity that the players perceive as fun” (Klopfer, 2008).

But fun, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder - so that can’t be the only criterium. For Vee Senap & Ibrahima, “the proposed heuristics components are Interface, Pedagogical/ Educational design/ Pedagogical effectiveness, Content/ Learning content, Playability, Multimedia, Enjoyment, Usability, Mechanics, Character/ Graphic and Mobility” (2019, p 1031).

Our OER site seeks to aid in helping educators to separate the good from the less than good in educational mobile gaming apps - ideally streamlining the process of deciding what the best options are to encourage the best outcomes from our students.