At STEMPlay Labs, we take fun seriously. In this 2 Part series, Director of Educaitona and Research, Mia Barrett shares inspiration and research that guides our game design and development.
When students call an educational game “fun,” what do they mean? They’re invoking a concept that researchers have spent decades trying to define, designers struggle to engineer, and measurement experts find stubbornly elusive. Fun is neither a single emotion nor a reliable predictor of learning. It’s a multidimensional experience that operates differently depending on who’s playing, what’s being learned, and how the game is designed.
Playing educational games “just for fun” may actually be the win. Fun enhances learning more than playing a game with explicit learning goals. This paradox sits at the heart of why understanding fun in educational games matters. And getting it wrong leads to “chocolate-covered broccoli.”
What students actually mean when they say “fun”
When K-12 students describe educational games as fun, they’re typically pointing to a specific cluster of experiences:
- appropriate challenge
- immediate feedback
- clear progression
- meaningful agency
Thomas Malone’s foundational 1981 research at MIT identified the core triad central to how young people experience enjoyable learning games—challenge, fantasy, and curiosity.
Challenge emerges as the most consistent theme across age groups. Students want games that are neither too difficult nor too easy. Variable difficulty levels build self-esteem and competence.
Here’s what researchers found: the relationship between challenge and skill level doesn’t just determine whether a game is fun—it determines whether students actually learn. A 2016 study tracked students playing educational games and discovered four distinct psychological states depending on how challenge matched their skills:
- Low challenge + Low skill = Apathy (bored and checked out)
- High skill + Low challenge = Relaxation (easy but not engaging)
- High challenge + Low skill = Anxiety (frustrated and overwhelmed)
- High challenge + High skill = Flow (fully engaged and learning)
Students distinguish types of fun in ways researchers are only beginning to capture. There’s immediate pleasure—the joy of playing. And there is “productive struggle” fun: experiences that aren’t enjoyable during the challenge but feel rewarding afterward.
- Learning often involves this second type, where frustration transforms into what game researcher Nicole Lazzaro calls fiero—the emotional triumph of overcoming adversity.
The good news is that both girls and boys love games that sneak learning in through the back door—no one wants to feel like they’re doing homework (Shute et al., 2021). But the type of challenge matters: girls tend to get more excited about exploration and discovery, while boys are often drawn to head-to-head competition and strategic gameplay (Kinzie & Joseph, 2008; Nguyen et al., 2023).
Educational game design for fun learning
Game designers working on educational titles face what Brenda Laurel termed the “chocolate-covered broccoli” problem: games where entertainment elements are layered over educational content rather than integrated with it, creating an experience that “still tastes bad” despite the sweet coating.
Fun-Inspo Leaderboard
At STEMPlay Labs, we take fun seriously. Here are 5 researchers who have inspired us recently in our quest to keep our educational games fun.
- Motivation Magic
The most influential solution for integrating fun into educational games comes from Self-Determination Theory. Intrinsic motivation—the kind that produces genuine engagement—requires:
- autonomy (feeling in control)
- competence (feeling capable)
- relatedness (feeling connected)
- Research by Ryan, Rigby, and Przybylski found that players who experience these needs during game play report higher enjoyment, greater motivation to continue, and even increased vitality and self-esteem afterward.
- Get in the Flow
Winning educational games often embody Csikszentmihalyi‘s concept of flow. Complete immersion in game play requires clear goals, immediate feedback, and a “flow channel” between boredom (too easy) and anxiety (too hard). Successful educational games maintain both
- Micro flow—short, intense engagement loops within gameplay
- Macro flow—a long-term difficulty curve across the entire experience
- Fun is Learning
Raph Koster’s “Theory of Fun” offers perhaps the most elegant resolution to the learning-entertainment tension in educational game design. Games provide pattern-matching challenges that brains enjoy solving; the act of “grokking” (deeply internalizing) new patterns produces chemical rewards that we experience as joy. When this theory holds, separating fun from learning becomes impossible because mastering the content should be the fun.
- Baked In Fun
The Learning Mechanics-Game Mechanics framework operationalizes this integration in educational game design. Developed by the Games and Learning Alliance network, it maps explicit connections between pedagogical elements (instruction, discovery, reflection, collaboration) and game mechanics (quests, levels, role-play, feedback loops). The goal is creating “Serious Game Mechanics” that make learning objectives emerge from gameplay rather than being added to it.
- A Maze of Fun
Because fun is so multifaceted, educational games have many avenues to integrate the fun factor. Lazzaro’s research using facial coding to measure emotional responses identified four “keys to fun” that successful games typically combine:
- Hard Fun (challenge leading to triumph)
- Easy Fun (curiosity and exploration)
- Serious Fun (meaningful impact)
- People Fun (social connection)
It’s the whole playground
Our reflection, fun and learning are not on opposite ends of a seesaw. Educational game design isn’t balancing entertainment against education but rather finding what’s inherently engaging about the content and building gameplay that makes mastering that content rewarding. When done well, the question of whether a game is “fun enough” or “educational enough” dissolves—the learning becomes the fun.
For practitioners, it means moving beyond both “gamification” (adding points and badges to otherwise unchanged content) and “edutainment” (entertainment with educational veneer). The most effective educational games are those where players cannot clearly distinguish what makes them fun from what makes them educational because they have become the same thing.
At STEMPlay Labs, we take fun seriously. In Part II of this series, Mia will dig deeper into the technical approaches on the cutting edge of game design research.
About the Autor
Mia Barrett, MEd, is the Director of Education Research and Development at STEMPlay Labs, where she leads the research behind the games. With a background in educational technology and program evaluation, Mia ensures every STEMPlay Labs product is grounded in evidence-based practices and delivers measurable impact for students. She is passionate about creating learning experiences that help kids — especially those who’ve been told they “aren’t math people” — discover their inner STEM star. LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/mia-barrett-med – Learn more about technology innovations in sex education at dfusioninc.com