Identifying Challenges for Elementary School Teachers in Building Digital Games through a Workshop

Joana Gabriela R. de Souza; Raquel Oliveira Prates

doi:10.5753/jis.2024.3951

Authors

Joana Gabriela R. de Souza Federal University of Minas Gerais https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1760-1868
Raquel Oliveira Prates Federal University of Minas Gerais https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7128-4974

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5753/jis.2024.3951

Keywords:

Serious games, Educational games, Game development, Teachers as game developers, Digital literacy

Abstract

To develop technologies that facilitate the creation and customization of digital educational games, this research aimed to explore the use of a game authoring tool by elementary school teachers and to identify the challenges and skills of this public using the tool. Our findings indicate that most of them had difficulties using it due to a lack of digital literacy and many possible configuration settings. They struggled with the steps they needed to complete in the tutorial and understanding concepts such as events, conditions, and actions. On the other hand, they were able to easily arrange the objects in the scenes. As a result, we present a set of recommendations that can be useful to construct new tools for this audience.

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