Sharing Experiences with Serious Games - the Edugamelab Rating Tool for Parents and Teachers

Computer games have been recognized for their educational potential for some time now and the number of educational games available has steadily increased in recent years. As the number of educational games available increases, serious games are starting to face a similar dilemma to other types of educational resources: how can educators or parents easily find the most relevant games and share their experiences from using them these games? To this end the EduGameLab project has developed a tool for sharing experiences about educational games among educators and parents in the form of a database of educational games and experiences of individual educators and parents with these games. The development of this database was based on a metadata schema for formally describing serious games and experiences with these games. In this paper we report on the development of this database, revisit and refine the metadata schema based on our experiences and evaluate the usability and usefulness of the database based on feedback gathered at practical workshops with educators.