Game Based Learning | Swaroop Joshi

AccessQuest: A Game-Based Approach to Digital Accessibility Education

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Accessibility Education for Software Engineers: Evaluating the Impact of Game-Based Learning

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Received ACM SIGCSE Special Projects Grant

Sat, 15 Mar 2025 15:22:30 +0530

I am glad to share that my project titled Serious Games for Teaching Accessibility was recently selected to receive the .

We are developing web-based serious games to teach digital accessibility concepts to computing students and software developers. We have developed two prototype games, A11YMythBuster and A11YBugHunter and tested them with 125 participants. Based on their feedback, following the Design-Based Research methodology, we will improve the games further and evaluate their impact on learning. The games are designed to help learners develop accessibility awareness and technical knowledge ( guidelines and ).

This grant will be used for game development, software licenses, and data collection. For more details, check out our project .

I thank Prof. Yolanda A. Rankin (Emory University), who coordinates the SIGCSE Special Projects program, for considering my proposal and the Review Committee for its valuable comments. I also thank my PhD advisee Parthasarathy PD and the undergraduate students who have worked/are working on this project.

Serious Games for Enhancing Accessibility Awareness and Skills

Sat, 09 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Teaching Digital Accessibility through Serious Games

Sat, 20 Mar 2021 12:45:18 +0530

Background

The estimates that more than a billion people live with some form of disability. The mandates countries to “… promote the design, development, production, and distribution of accessible information and communications technologies and systems…”. To accomplish this, concepts and skills needed to develop accessible products and services must be included in computing education. Software companies like , , , and emphasize making their products accessible, and accessibility often features as a preferred skill in their job postings. For instance, a current for a Software Engineer position specifies “Experience developing accessible technologies” as a preferred qualification.

The Problem

Despite such increasing awareness in the software industry about accessibility in the recent years, many . Software professionals point to for this gap in implementing accessibility.

According to the , the main barriers to teaching accessibility include the lack of clear learning objectives about accessibility and their lack of knowledge about accessibility. Also, most instructors who teach accessibility have a background in human-computer interaction (HCI) and related fields and teach these topics in specialized courses. This indicates that other instructors may find it challenging to build their expertise and to incorporate accessibility topics in “mainstream” CS courses.

Our Contribution

We have developed fun, self-paced learning interventions, in the form of three sets of games:

Accessibility Awareness: (a) a special version of Wordle that asks you to guess a five-letter word, and tells you how it relates to accessibility, and (b) a game that asks you to burst the bubbles that carry a myth about accessibility, while saving the ones that carry a fact.
Access Quest: A role playing game that helps you learn WCAG guidelines about accessibility by solving puzzles and challenges a software developer may face in a day-to-day life.
Bug Hunter: A race against time game with a goal to find as many accessibility bugs in a web page as possible. The game is designed to assess your knowledge of WCAG guidelines.

You can try out these games at

We welcome your feedback and suggestion.

This project is supported by the

and BITS Pilani Research Initiation Grant.

Defining a Geogame Genre Using Core Concepts of Games, Play, and Geographic Information and Thinking

Mon, 01 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Geogame

Wed, 27 Apr 2016 17:01:23 -0600

This project is no longer active.

GeoGame is a web based role-playing game developed to let the students of geography experience the life of an ordinary farmer in developing countries, and thereby learn concepts of green revolution, etc. It is developed using MVC .NET architecture. I worked on this NSF-funded project (Grants and ) as a graduate research associate in .

For more information, read our book chapter “ ”.