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Providing rewards in an educational game?

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4 comments, last by Scouting Ninja 6 years, 5 months ago

Hello

I am developing a mobile game in flash. The overall point of the game is to teach a real world skill set , but i want to make the experience fun an engaging as well. Here is the problem i am thinking about, since the point is to learn something, if a user makes a mistake (wrong decision) he is told what he did wrong and gets to go back and try again. Users will actually learn more by making wrong decisions. So I am not punishing users for wrong decisions or keeping any kind of score. Since there is no score I have no basis for providing rewards. It seems pointless to offer rewards for completing the game or even portions of it since all users will complete that game as long as they don't quit. I realize that a various types of rewards are what make a game addictive.  And the other issue is that once a user learns what the game has to teach there will be little replay value. So has anyone encountered these issues before and are there any good solutions? Thanks

 

 

 

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1 hour ago, stalkey said:

It seems pointless to offer rewards for completing the game or even portions of it since all users will complete that game as long as they don't quit.

Achievements can be effective even without a basis. People like to see, increasing numbers, gold stars, etc.

Idle/clicker games operate entirely on this principle.

Tristam MacDonald. Ex-BigTech Software Engineer. Future farmer. [https://trist.am]

What is the real world skill set?  Would it involve the creation of something?  There could be a strategic layer too the game, where something is built through supplying the correct solutions along the way.  So, for example, if your game was teaching carpentry each of its lessons could add too a house, and in the end getting all of the exercises right would result in a completed house.

"I wish that I could live it all again."

The real world skill is a conversation skill called elicitation.. 

On 1/24/2018 at 7:18 PM, stalkey said:

So has anyone encountered these issues before and are there any good solutions?

Make a challenge mode.

You have the main game that acts as a tutorial. Then you have a challenge mode where users answer questions or play games using what they learned.

The challenge mode has scores that they can use to compete with other people that have the same interest. Users with the highest score knows the most.

Competition is a huge driving force behind games.

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