Developing and Assessing a Customizable Educational Game

This innovative practice full paper describes the creation of a customizable educational game and measures its effectiveness and student enjoyment. The gamification of learning is an effective tool for instructors to help their students learn concepts. Their popularity has slowly increased in classrooms, which has revealed the issue of reusability with many of them for different subjects or concepts. This has led to the rise of customizable video games, which allow instructors to modify the learning aspect of the game to improve its usability in multiple classes. The game, UnBlocked, effectively has two modes: Teacher and Student. The mode is determined by the account they use to log in with. The goal of the game is to move the red block out of the puzzle by moving the red and brown blocks within ten moves. After completing the level, the student will have to take a quiz created by their teacher. The student will see their score after completing the quiz and starts the next level. The Teacher mode allows instructors to create in-game quizzes with their own questions for their students. Each quiz has five multiple-choice questions and is saved to Playfab, a backend development platform, after creation with a 5 -character string that instructors can give students to access the quiz. The purpose of UnBlocked is to provide instructors with a fun way to give quizzes to their students. The game has been used in two classes and evaluated using surveys to determine user sentiment.