Educational Serious Games as a Service: Challenges and Solutions

Abstract

Cloud computing is a distributed computing technology that facilitates access to resources in a dynamic and scalable way which is highly available.  One of the service models is SaaS (Software as a Service) which allows executing Web applications flexible and elastically while offering collaborative characteristics. The integration of SaaS in educational environments promotes academic performance and facilitates knowledge management, allowing for storage, exchange, access, and synchronization of information.  On the other hand, serious educational games promote among the people involved: collaboration, communication, social abilities, critical thinking, and problems solving. The present work analyzes the challenges that SaaS, with its collaborative and Multi-Tenant characteristics, offer to the execution of serious educational games, this is named JSEaaS –Serious Educational Games as a Service.  The analysis was developed based on an exhaustive and systematic bibliographic revision with a qualitative methodological focus, which generated investigation questions, search strategies, keywords and inclusion and exclusion criteria that were applied to identify articles in different sources. This work allowed for the development of a list of the functional characteristics that the serious educational games will acquire when used as software as a service.