Coding and digital game design activities have been used in recent years to contribute to students' academic achievement and twenty-first century skills. This study aimed to investigate the effect of the 5E model enriched with coding and digital game design activities (5EECD) on gifted students' academic achievement and problem-solving skills. A…

This paper reports on a large clinical study with 193 children (Grades 3-6) who interacted with 12 digital math games during clinical interviews. Children completed a pretest, interacted with the digital math games, completed a posttest, and answered questions about their interactions with the games. During the interviews, researchers used two…

The goal of the current study was to contribute to our emergent understanding of whether and how particular types of digital games can support student learning and engagement. We focused on commercially available educational apps that focused on similar content (fraction comparison and equivalence) but represented extremes in how game-like they…

This mixed methods study examined how engagement in robotics and game design influenced students' self-efficacy, STEM attitudes, and computational thinking (CT) skills. Predominantly African-American students engaged in engineering and computer science tasks during informal learning environments. Results revealed students' self-efficacy scores on…

Serious video games (SVGs) are increasingly used as supplementary teaching tools for mathematics education. Several studies report their positive impact on student learning. However, these impacts are variable, and the success of the tools cannot be generalized or extended to all settings or disciplines without an in-depth look at the games…

There is a growing need for STEAM-based (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics) knowledge and skills across a wide range of professions (Brazell 2013). Yet students often fail to see the usefulness of mathematics beyond the classroom (Kloosterman, Raymond, and Emenaker 1996), and they do not regularly make connections between…

Engagement in game design tasks can help preservice teachers develop pedagogical and technical skills for teaching and promoting critical thinking and problem-solving skills. Through the design process, preservice teachers not only exercise critical-thinking and problem-solving skills, but also learn about an instructional method to support their…

Participatory design principles were used with primarily African-American and Latino children in the Washington, DC area in the development of sports-themed digital game prototypes in an after-school program. The three stages in participatory design are the discovery stage, the evaluative stage, and prototyping. Within the participatory design…