Zeus – A tool for generating rule-based serious games with gamification techniques

Abstract

Gamification refers to the use of rules and game design techniques to involve and motivate people to achieve their goals. This work proposes an application development architecture that can generate game applications with gamification techniques. As a proof of concept, we introduce Zeus, a platform for developing ruled-based serious game applications with gamification techniques. Zeus aims at generating gamified applications that can meet the learning goals set by users. These goals will be reflected through both learning and game attributes that users can personally select. To assess the functionality of our tool, we conduct a qualitative evaluation of four rule-based serious game applications developed with Zeus to help students learn about arithmetic. We make use of the Fun Toolkit to perform this evaluation in terms of the delivery of both fun and learning experiences. Our findings are encouraging in the context of learning basic arithmetic operations with Zeus game applications.