An agent-based modelling approach to build up educational digital games for kindergarten and primary schools

Most of the educational materials, such as the exercises contained in activity books or the Montessori-like games that are commonly used in kindergartens and primary schools share a common deep structure and have similar features. Capturing these commonalities in an explanatory model leads to a general framework that may be useful to develop games engine, in particular, digital games for children that enhance the learning and teaching experiences. In this paper, we analyze the structure of above mentioned educational materials and propose to describe it in terms of interacting agents' model. Moreover, we present Block Magic and SNIFF, first two examples of educational Montessori-like games to better explain how this general framework can be employed in educational game development.