My Dissertation

This is the main page about my dissertation work. Here I’ll describe the subject and the research questions of my Ph.D. dissertation. The page will also have links to the current state of the work (Product Backlog) and excerpts of individual chapters. As well as links to already published articles.

The Aim of the Research

The aim of my dissertation is to offer solutions for arranging the development process of digital learning games in a way that maximises the possibility of success in the development. The focus is on the game development and software development disciplines, but the approach is by necessity multi-disciplinary. This goal is pursued through studying the existing literature on the subject and related disciplines as well as conducting and studying empirical development experiments of digital learning games.

From the Introductory text of my dissertation:

This study is part of the research project Human-Centered Design of Game-Based Learning Environments. The overall aim of the project is to construct a multidisciplinary and user-driven process for the development of digital Game-Based Learning Environments.

The development of motivating and inspiring digital learning games is a complex and multifaceted task. At its best, the quality development of learning games is a multi-disciplinary and user-driven process, which thoroughly combines the expertise of fields such as educational sciences, software engineering, user-centered design, game design and development, and the content disciplines of a specific game.

Earlier research on game-based learning has located several elements that indicate the possibilities of digital Game-Based Learning Environments. Earlier research has focused on defining the essential features of digital learning game as an end product, the involvement of users in the design process, the design of collaboration and authoring of collaborative scripts for game environments. However, the process of digital learning game development has not yet been explored thoroughly.

This dissertation aims to provide results for this need for research.

Research question: What are the key aspects of a quality learning game development process?

Sub-questions:

1. What kind of team structure and composition is optimal for learning game development?
2. Into what tasks can the development process be divided? How are those tasks related? How can this be described with process models?
3. What kind of process control model would best suit learning game development?

Dissertation Status

Here’s the status chapter by chapter:

1. Introduction	2nd draft	To Be Revised
2. Setting and Methodology	Ready
3. Literature, part 1	2nd draft	To Be Revised
4. Literature, part 2	Ready
5. Literature, part 3	Ready
6. Results, pt. 1	Ready
7. Results, pt. 2	Ready	Waiting for comments
8. Results, pt. 3	First Draft
9. Results, pt. 4	Writing the First Draft	Work in Progress
10. Conclusions	To Be Done

I’m keeping this table for a while, as updating it was such a joy. I really have made some progress since I last updated it.

Note: Although I’ve marked several chapters ready, this doesn’t mean I plan on doing nothing to them at all in the future. It simply means I am not going to revise them before other parts of the dissertation are completed.

Dissertation Text

Latest versions can be found here.