From competition to metacognition

We investigate the unique educational benefits of 1-on-1 competitive games, arguing that such games can be just as easy to design as single-player educational games, while yielding a more diverse and sustainable learning experience. We present a study of chess and StarCraft II in order to inform the design of similar educational games and their communities. We discuss a competitive game we designed to teach Java programming. We evaluate the game by discussing its user study. Our main contributions are 1) an argument that the use of 1-on-1 competition can solve two existing problems inherent to single-player games, 2) an analysis of the features that make competitive games effective learning environments, and 3) an early but encouraging description of the emergent learning environment one can expect from designing an educational game with these features.