Encouraging Student Engagement with Collaborative Serious Games: The COCO Framework

Collaborative serious games may offer new methods for encouraging student engagement but are currently underexplored in the literature. Their construction remains difficult partly due to a lack of conceptualisation. In this paper, we present COCO — a conceptual framework for collaborative serious games. We explore the validity of its components using t-tests to analyse the data from surveying and interviewing 10 experts and surveying 23 students. We find the results validate the framework and conclude that our framework provides an appropriate theoretical foundation for further research and can aid understanding and communication about collaborative serious games.