Work in progress — Using interactivity video games factors to define Role Playing Games as a supporting tool for learning by doing

Edutainment has emerged as a computational area that combines entertainment and education in order to engage students to learn in creative ways. Role Playing Games (RPG) are a type of games where players take the role of a character within a story and make decisions to advance and reach a given goal. RPG's are highly interactive entertainment tools that propose complex virtual worlds and rich and interesting story lines. These characteristics could be used to engage students and as vehicles to deliver educational material. Based on this, we have developed a generic architecture for edutainment systems called RchEd. This architecture defines a User Interface component to support multimedia deployment. An Edutainment System component will manage user interactions and the game development. The methodology, edutainment architecture and preliminary results are shown.