Overcoming challenges in educational stem game design and development

Captivate is a mobile game for STEM in higher education. In the development of Captivate, the employment of popular game mechanics and development of a set of mathematical tools have allowed developers to overcome some of the problems commonly facing developers of educational STEM games for higher education. Game mechanics from a variety of popular games are incorporated which supports player engagement by providing a familiar narrative to each game. Additionally, mathematical tools have been developed which provide symbolic and numeric manipulation capabilities within the game. These tools allow for graphing, problem generation and display, multiple types of player input, and evaluation of player answers all to be conducted at run time. This paper details how challenges were overcome and addressed in Captivate with examples, namely display and manipulation of complex expressions and the complexity and length of problems.