Designing educational mini games

Abstract

Children like playing online mini-games, even if these are about a school topic like mathematics, but do they learn from these games? This paper is about mini-games that aim at problem solving. We shall argue that there is a difference between designing software that will be part of the curriculum, and mini-games that will be played by children unsupervised. One of the difficulties is that the computer stimulates children to experiment, but experimenting may also keep children from thinking through a problem.