JEN-Planet: an Automatically Updating Serious Game Catalogue Designed with and for Teachers

Abstract

Serious Games (SGs) intended for educational purposes can improve the quality of learning in many contexts and at all levels. However, their use in schools remains minimal despite their many educational and pedagogical benefits. This lack of interest is partly due to educational SGs’ visibility problem. Indeed, in practice, they are mainly indexed in catalogues containing all types of SGs (not necessarily educational). Also, the existing catalogues, often designed by video game editors, do not offer relevant and practical filters to help teachers find SGs adapted to their specific needs. This article proposes JEN-Planet, a catalogue designed from several research contributions to help teachers find existing educational SGs. A comparative study is therefore carried out on its usability, relevance, and utility against those of the two other major catalogues. 50 teachers explored the different catalogues and evaluated them by completing questionnaires. The results show that the JEN-Planet catalogue better meets teachers' needs. This catalogue could therefore improve the visibility of educational SGs for teachers, who will be able to find them more easily.