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The use of new technical tools as a mean to increase the motivation and improve the education of students is an intriguing and pressing issue. Specifically, great interest has been shown in the use of videogames since they constitute a common leisure-time activity of many young students, a circumstance that shows their motivational, if not their educational, potential. In this paper we suggest that the design of videogames can be a very effective activity. To demonstrate this, we have used game design as a test-bed for an experience involving Computer Science and History students: interdisciplinary teams have cooperated in the design of a video-game on an historical theme. The experience has been repeated along three academic years. The students’ motivation has been evaluated in the last 2 years, demonstrating that it is higher when they use the interdisciplinary design of videogames as a way of learning instead of traditional learning methods.

Over the last years, not only have computer games become a popular leisure activity, they have also come to be considered as an important tool for learning and skill acquisition (Boyle et al., 2011 and Wong et al., 2007). Their use has been experimented with in educational settings, with the main purpose of increasing the students’ engagement (Durkin & Barber, 2002). All this, based on the idea that, in the early years of life, games are one of the most important activities for learning (Smith & Pellegrini, 2008) and that recovering this ludic component can help learning in adult life as well. Serious (or learning) games are games intentionally designed for learning, skill acquisition and training. Contrary to pure entertainment games, the motivation behind learning games is educational, being their entertainment value merely a tool useful to improve learning. Several games for learning have been developed in different areas ( Bos et al., 2006, Hainey et al., 2011, Kato and Beale, 2006, Skiba, 2008, Squire, 2004 and Zwikael and Gonen, 2007), based on the underlying idea that the motivating power of entertainment games can be included in learning games, thereby helping players in their learning process. Game-based education recognizes that learning is a function of the activity, context and culture in which it occurs ( Lave, 1988). Game-based learning is also consistent with problem-based learning, which asserts that learning is most effective when it poses significant, contextualized, real world situations and provides resources, guidance, and instruction to learners as they develop content knowledge and problem-solving skills ( Mayo, Donnelly, Nash, & Schwartz, 1993). The increasingly realistic experience obtained through video games has generated a great interest in using them to understand the mechanisms of students’ engagement (Boyle, Connolly, Hainey, & Boyle, 2012). It has been found that computer games can have a positive impact on the development of cognitive capacities such as attention and concentration span (Jennett et al., 2008, Schneider and Shiffrin, 1977 and Weibel et al., 2008), which are extremely relevant in the learning process. Several theories (Savery & Duffy 1995) have been developed to explain why people of all ages and genders enjoy playing games; motivational theories have been used to explain the appeal of games, taking into account the very basic needs for competence, autonomy and relatedness that drive human behavior (Przybylski et al., 2009 and Ryan and Deci, 2000); other studies develop theoretical models about the role of satisfaction (Ryan, Rigby, & Przybylski, 2006). Physiological and psychological variables have been also widely studied as a function of the exposure of players to computers games (Baldaro et al., 2004). Several researchers also claimed that computer games can increase higher level cognition such as critical thinking, argumentation and hypothesis testing (Dondlinger, 2007). Although there are several studies about the benefits of using games (Marchiori et al., 2012 and Moreno-Ger et al., 2008), determining the advantages of the game design itself is a different matter on which results are scarce. This is the matter we are beginning to explore in this paper, studying if game design is an engaging activity that can whet interest in learning in our target environment (undergraduate university students). In this work we have assembled a team composed of Computer Scientists, Psychologists, and Historians. With this interdisciplinary team, we have been able to develop a serious game model that can be designed and implemented by undergraduate students in the course of a semester. In this paper we show the details of the game design model and the characteristics that make it suitable for students. This information will be useful for the readers to get a better understanding of the potential applications of our game engines. Based on the games designed by the students, we have carried out a motivation study to obtain a deeper understanding of the advantages of interdisciplinary game design through the learning process. This study has been developed during two academic years (although the game design was developed along three academic years, the first year was used as a preliminary feasibility study, and no hard results were derived from it). In both years, the motivation study was based on the comparison of texts that the students made related to the videogames with text related to a critical analysis of a book (which is a task related to traditional methods of learning). As we will demonstrate, the students’ emotion levels during the game design process are higher than those derived from traditional learning tasks. We will also demonstrate that the coordination between different disciplines is a key parameter to keep the students’ motivation high.

In this paper we have proposed a game design that allows students to create a serious game. We have developed a serious game design technique that allows undergraduate students from different areas to create a video game based on the material they are learning. The goal of this method is to improve skills that are not usually stressed in traditional learning methods, such as interdisciplinary knowledge or team work. The design was divided into two different phases: programming and storytelling, where students assigned to the storytelling phase do not need to acquire high programming skills. The game engine and plot has been developed along three different academic years, where the experience achieved in the first two years were used to developed the last version of the game, which is the most stable and user-friendly for the history students. Also, experiments on students’ emotions have been developed. To analyze the students’ motivation, we have evaluated the presence of specific emotions in the texts written by the students during the game design. We have found that the emotion “anger”, which previous studies have related to motivation and enthusiasm for one’s activity is more prominent in the text related to the game design than in those of the control group. We have been careful about the nature of the texts, to be sure that it does not affect the conclusions. Moreover, we have detected that a correct coordination between different disciplines is a key factor to keep the students’ motivation high. These experiments demonstrate that the use of serious games in the learning process increases the motivation when it is compared to the motivation induced by traditional learning techniques. This fact, supported by our simple game design procedure, makes our method a suitable candidate to be included as an additional learning tool in many different areas.