PlayWithUnicam: An extensible platform for serious games

Nowadays, teaching methodologies have been fostered by the integration with game-based approaches leading to the birth of the so-called serious games, i.e. games that do not have entertainment as their main purpose but are designed primarily for educational purposes. Although they have always been the subject of debate and criticism, serious games leverage game-based learning for playing an important role in education, showing that they are not just a form of entertainment, but are effective vehicles for dissemination and sharing of knowledge. The effectiveness of serious games is proved by the wide list of software providing this kind of solution. However, it is difficult to find tools that offer at the same time a good level of content customization and the possibility of multiplayer to ensure a more engaging, stimulating, and competitive teaching experience. Nevertheless, almost all these tools are fee-based. With the aim of filling this gap, this paper presents an open-source and free-to-use platform for serious games that is extensible both in the number of games and in the games’ content. More in detail, we propose a platform hosting a catalog, expandable over time, of multiplayer serious games that can be easily tailored to different learning topics, e.g., math, history, and informatics, depending on the teachers’ needs. The platform is meant to be easily extensible and scalable by means of reusable components and features. In addition, the developed application was validated in a series of events, together with students, to check the effectiveness of game-based learning and the general usability of the tool.