Applying game design principles to social skills learning for students in special education

Growing evidence suggests that games can be a highly effective and motivating framework for learning. Digital games are increasingly prevalent in today's classrooms, and game-based learning is emerging as a successful means of reaching students who often struggle to succeed through more traditional approaches. For example, students with autism face a unique set of challenges and goals in the context of classroom learning. Principles of well-designed games offer a powerful framework for designing new types of learning experiences for students with autism. Moreover, recent innovations in computing interfaces have also lead to new forms of socio-collaborative experiences with digital media. This article introduces our recent case study in applying game-based learning in Special Education. We will present the learning scenario goals and implementation, focusing on how this work successfully applied well-designed game principles to this context. We briefly describe our evaluation methodology and preliminary results.