Overcoming challenges in educational stem game design and development

Captivate is a mobile game for STEM in higher education. In the development of Captivate, the employment of popular game mechanics and development of a set of mathematical tools have allowed developers to overcome some of the problems commonly facing developers of educational STEM games for higher education. Game mechanics from a variety of popular games are incorporated which supports player engagement by providing a familiar narrative to each game. Additionally, mathematical tools have been developed which provide symbolic and numeric manipulation capabilities within the game. These tools allow for graphing, problem generation and display, multiple types of player input, and evaluation of player answers all to be conducted at run time. This paper details how challenges were overcome and addressed in Captivate with examples, namely display and manipulation of complex expressions and the complexity and length of problems.

《Captivate》是一款用于高等教育中STEM（科学、技术、工程和数学）领域的移动游戏。在《Captivate》的开发过程中，流行游戏机制的运用以及一套数学工具的开发使开发者能够克服高等教育STEM教育游戏开发者通常面临的一些问题。该游戏融合了多种流行游戏的机制，通过为每个游戏提供熟悉的叙事来提高玩家的参与度。此外，还开发了数学工具，在游戏中提供符号和数字操作能力。这些工具允许在运行时进行绘图、问题生成与显示、多种类型的玩家输入以及对玩家答案的评估。本文详细介绍了在《Captivate》中是如何克服挑战并加以解决的，并举例说明，即复杂表达式的显示与操作以及问题的复杂性和长度。