Part of Evidence of Educational Game Design. Testing with learners is set out in how to tell whether a game teaches.
Choosing a partner for an educational game
When the main result of a project is a game, the organisation that builds it is judged twice: as a member of the partnership, and through the result it delivers. Funders spell out what they look for, and the Erasmus+ Programme Guide does so in unusual detail, so it serves as the worked example here.
By Ilija Bojović, Founder / Lead game designer
Contents
What funders score
Funders judge the partnership as well as the plan. In an Erasmus+ Cooperation Partnership, for example, the quality of the partnership and the cooperation arrangements is worth up to 20 of the 100 points, and a proposal needs at least 10 of them. The criterion asks for "an appropriate mix of participating organisations in terms of profile, including grassroots organisations, past experience in the Programme and expertise to successfully complete all project objectives".
The Erasmus+ guide for evaluators makes the test concrete: the expert assesses "to what extent the proposal concretely identifies which skills, experiences, expertise and management support each of the participating organisations will make available". When the result is a game, that means naming who designs it, who builds it and who tests it with learners. A proposal that leaves those tasks unassigned gives the evaluator nothing to score.
Partner or subcontractor
The Erasmus+ Programme Guide allows subcontracting "as long as it does not cover core activities on which the achievement of the objectives of the action directly depends." When the game is the main result, its design and development are hard to describe as anything other than core. That points to bringing the organisation that makes the game into the consortium as a partner, with its tasks written into the work plan.
The same criterion rewards an "allocation of tasks" that "demonstrates the commitment and active contribution of all participating organisations". A partner that leads the game work package satisfies it directly.
The mechanism carries the learning outcome
Arnab and colleagues describe the central task of serious game design as "the translation of learning goals/practices into mechanical element of gameplay", and their Learning Mechanics–Game Mechanics model maps one onto the other. Kalmpourtzis and Romero extend the idea to constructive alignment: coherence between learning objectives, game mechanisms, learning mechanisms and assessment. Reviewing designs in higher education, they observed little attention to the assessment part.
For a proposal, assessment is where the evaluator looks. The design criterion asks for "qualitative and quantitative indicators, that are realistic, feasible". A candidate partner should be able to say how each learning outcome becomes a mechanism, and how the game will show whether the outcome was reached.
Experts and learners in the design
Khaled and Vasalou note that "serious game designers must be fluent with both domain content and game design", which few people are alone. In practice the domain knowledge comes from subject matter experts. Dimitriadou and colleagues studied educators in exactly that role and concluded that the work depends on "developing trust between target users, the technical development team, and educators".
How they take part matters. A meta-analysis by DeSmet and colleagues found that games built with participatory design were not more effective overall, with "more support … for informant roles than for codesign roles". Participation was associated with stronger effects when it shaped game dynamics, levels and challenge. Experts and learners inform and test the design; the designers keep responsibility for it.
Results stay open
Some funders make openness a condition. Every Erasmus+ beneficiary must make educational resources and tools produced in a project, including "documents, media, software or other materials", freely available "under an open license". The licence "must allow the public to use, reuse, adapt and share the resource", and the material should be uploaded "in an editable digital form". The Programme Guide names Creative Commons Attribution licences for content and GNU licences for software as examples.
In Erasmus+, open licensing is also scored: the impact criterion asks how materials "will be made freely available and promoted through open licences, and does not contain disproportionate limitations". The licence for a game's content and its source code should therefore be agreed before the proposal is written, together with where the source will be published at the end.
Questions for a candidate partner
- Which learning outcomes will the game address, and through which mechanisms?
- How will the game show whether each outcome has been reached?
- Who tests each version, how many rounds are planned, and what changes between them?
- Which licences will apply to the content and to the source code, and where will they be published?
- Which tasks and work packages will the partner lead?
Cognitika's own answers are on its partner page.
References
- Arnab, S., Lim, T., Carvalho, M. B., Bellotti, F., de Freitas, S., Louchart, S., Suttie, N., Berta, R., & De Gloria, A. (2015). Mapping learning and game mechanics for serious games analysis. British Journal of Educational Technology, 46(2), 391–411.
- DeSmet, A., Thompson, D., Baranowski, T., Palmeira, A., Verloigne, M., & De Bourdeaudhuij, I. (2016). Is participatory design associated with the effectiveness of serious digital games for healthy lifestyle promotion? A meta-analysis. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 18(4), e94.
- Dimitriadou, A., Djafarova, N., Turetken, O., Verkuyl, M., & Ferworn, A. (2021). Challenges in serious game design and development: Educators' experiences. Simulation & Gaming, 52(2), 132–152.
- European Commission. (2025). Erasmus+ Programme Guide 2026 (Version 1, 12.11.2025).
- European Commission. (2025). Erasmus+ guide for experts on quality assessment 2026 (Version 1, 22.12.2025).
- Kalmpourtzis, G., & Romero, M. (2020). Constructive alignment of learning mechanics and game mechanics in serious game design in higher education. International Journal of Serious Games, 7(4), 75–88.
- Khaled, R., & Vasalou, A. (2014). Bridging serious games and participatory design. International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction, 2(2), 93–100.