Research On Educational Game Design Of “Xiu Qi”

In Conceptual Age,science and technologies are developing rapidly.The requirements of the country and society for talents are increasing.Some high-order thinking abilities like critical thinking has become a prerequisite for talents to adapt to the developing society.This means the current talent training ways need to change.Recently,"Game-based learning" and "Educational Games" have become popular.Games can boost children’s interest in learning and cultivate their various thinking abilities.It has become one of the significant ways for children in "digital generation" to learn.Games are a good platform to develop children’s critical thinking,because it has many different kinds of learning environment,diversified perspectives,a great many interest tasks and so on.This paper reviews the development of educational games and critical thinking at first.And collecting existing teaching cases and learning models to analyze the current teaching methods of critical thinking.Furthermore,according some theories like critical rationalism,construction learning theory,multiple intelligence theory and the game-based learning theory,as well as analyze the children thinking and cognitive features.Then the game design principles and a design model are formed.Educational games design that develop children’s critical thinking should follow some principles,including positive and negative contrast,inspired by questions,easy to use and the balance of education and entertainment.The game design model combined with four stages: the first is preliminary understanding stage,the second is information collecting stage,the third is information processing stage and the last one is decision making part.In each stage,the game narrative contents,rules,tasks,feedback and other game elements are used to provide help for children thinking ways and inspire their critical thinking.According to the above principles and a model,this paper designs an educational game "Xiu Qi" to develop critical thinking of children and explain the game design ideas,story,character design,scene design,interactive design and implementation technology at same time.Then,a questionnaire was used to test "Xiu Qi" usability to confirm the practical significance of this study.Finally,the deficiencies of the game interface and operating functions were collected through questionnaires,and then optimized and improved.