Educational MMORPG Design; An edutainment approach for METS

Abstract

Nowadays average teenager students in middle schools are losing more and more time and interest in school work to video games. Science suffers heavily on this loss, including math, mechanic, physics, chemistry, biology and so on. All of these subjects can be categorized as METS, acronym for math, engineering, technology and science. This is a study backed with an industrial motivation and probing into the enormous potentials of educational video games and edutainment, especifically the scientific MMORPG, which is a relatively newly emerging field and demands a long term exploring work with multi-disciplinary endeavors. The research work presented in this master thesis is an attempt of merging these potential theories into a solid framework and drawing up a roadmap that can lead to a practical design solution for further work. This is a process of instantiating generally abstract theories within an certain design space, which in this case defined under scientific MMORPG.