Towards A Comprehensive Serious Educational Games' Ontology

Abstract

Serious Educational Games (SEGs) are games that have a purpose that differs from those for entertainment only. SEGs offer learners practicing what they learnt. The analysis and design of such games require integrating game design activities with educational design concepts (such as learning objectives, assessment methods, and educational content design). In addition, the integration of these domains require interdisciplinary team. As a result, a clear, concise communication between team members is a difficult goal to achieve and ambiguity could arise. An ontology, as a domain modeling tool, could be used as a meta-model to guide a SEG design and the development team, in addition to bridging the communication gap between the game design and pedagogic domains. There is little proof that a comprehensive web-enabled SEGs' ontology, which is characterized by completion, consistency, and reusability, exists. This paper presents our attempt to build a comprehensive web enabled SEGs ontology that could be exploited in the era of the semantic web to be shared and reused by the SEGs' development community. It is available on Protégé.