Design and Implementation of Location-Based Learning Games: Four Case Studies with “QuesTInSitu: The Game”

Over the past few years the use of educational games for learning purposes has reported many educational benefits in terms of students' motivation and engagement towards learning. One of the challenges in the research field of Game-Based Learning (GBL) is to create or adapt educational games to teachers' requirements depending on their particular situations. An approach to face this problem is to provide teachers with strategies that allow them to design meaningful games for their learning scenarios. To address this issue, a metaphor has been proposed for supporting teachers in the design of the so-called location-based learning games. In this study, we describe four real learning contexts, including 16 secondary education teachers use the proposed metaphor to design their own location-based games. Besides, in order to gain meaningful insights about the impact of the designed games in students' satisfaction, we deployed the teachers' designs in “QuesTInSitu: The Game”. A total of 253 students from the 4 secondary schools played the designed games. The main findings derived from the evaluation with teachers and students provide meaningful insights about main considerations when designing and deploying location-based learning games for outdoors and indoors.