Supporting Knowledge Sharing for the Co-design of Digital Learning Games

This paper deals with knowledge sharing during a collaborative and design-based research project about game-based learning. According to a literature review about serious game design, a key process for collaborative work is knowledge sharing. This process is analysed with the frames of praxeologies and boundary objects. The praxeology framework aims to identify the participants’ practice and discourse about this practice for the design of serious games. The boundary objects framework aims to identify knowledge transactions during collaborative work. We collected data from workshops dedicated to co-design of TSADK, a serious game for computer education. We performed a thematic analysis on participants’ verbatim for nine workshops. The thematic analysis focuses on one subject: the learning outcomes of the game. The analysis has identified themes on this subject: to specify, to phrase and to select the main learning outcomes. Regarding these themes, the praxeology and boundary object frameworks allow us to identify common practice but no common knowledge and thus, an obstacle to collaboration. Based on these results, we propose a tool for supporting the collaboration design through sharing knowledge.