on how to transform an engineering concept to become a story-telling of game play. These process included by educational message on it.

There two main stream of research of computer games in education: The passive game playing and the active game development approach.

At the game playing side the research also branches in two, using existing games or develop custom games for the purpose. Currently, games branded as educational have poor design and mostly resort to a behaviouristic model of gamification, quiz based challenges to earn points. Th best research challenges in this field is to harness the entangling power of industry quality games to convey education. How to use Medal of Honour, Assassins Creed or Valiant Hearts to teach history?

The research on custom made games main challenge is how to escape the quiz/bonus pitfall to develop a real knowledge building game. A game where the knowledge acquisition is the main path to advance in the game and at the same time is the real game quest is a relevant research target. Games like CellCraft from Armor Games are hard to design.

Using game development as a pedagogical drive is another interesting research question. Game development is an interdisciplinary task and requires actual knowledge building before one can develop a successful game. Th research in this field is how to develop useful methodologies to teach using game development.

Commercial games have the design quality, budgets and staff to make for a highly compelling experience, so something like Total War appears to make sense in an appropriate history lesson. However, it's unclear whether students learn something about history or merely how to play a great game a little better. Custom educational games are problematic because they rarely meet the expected design quality fans of videogames are used to, they take too long to make, there are still questions over what is actually learnt and they restrict pedagogic practice of the teacher. A purer gamification approach, that makes a game of the teacher's existing practice, is more tempting. It's more flexible and easier to wrap around any course content. However, the lazy approach of just adding leaderboards, points and badges won't give the maximum return possible. What's needed is to draw more deeply on videogame design principles and modern videogame aesthetics. If the final system/game is going to be flexible and applicable to multiple courses then it justifies the expense.

Through games and especially serious games players learn skills that makes them win the game, but sometimes they can't transfer these skills in other contexts and use them outside of the game. In any case these skills differ from those developed in other formats of education.