Designing educational games based on intangible cultural heritage for rural children: A case study on “logic huayao”

Abstract

Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) is one of the application fields of educational games. However, most of these applications are provided for the general public of cultural experience or information access, rather than designing for rural children’s cultural learning. We propose that rural children are critical learners and inheritors of ICH. ICH education has to be future-oriented and integrated with rural children’s learning needs and learning styles. This research is conducted in rural China with local children. We observe the learning behaviors of rural children through an experiment, and classify learners into activists, reflectors, negatives and entertainers. With the design case of “Logic Huayao”, we present a design model for educational games with cultural learning. In designing process, the players, culture, games, and learning contents should be considered as an inclusive model and integrated into the final interaction design process. Finding the relationship between them will enable us to develop educational games that include cultural meaning and problem-solving skills.