Wargames and crisis simulations can be useful pedagogical tools when deliberately used. This paper explores the spectrum of pedagogical objectives; what use are wargames for learning? What types of objectives can they explore? How do you align the learning objectives with the right type of game? The paper leverages Bloom's Taxonomy of learning as…

Playing games holds an important role in learning and development. While designing and using digital game-based learning (DGML) environments becomes more appealing to educators, there is a disconnect between the goals that educators try to achieve and the design strategies they utilize to achieve their goals. The inclusion of game elements alone…

Gamification is increasingly being implemented in higher education to engage students. This article presents a gamified pedagogical exercise intended to motivate students to consider how their in-person and digital behaviors affect their personal brands. Students receive and lose points for various behaviors and reflect on whether these behaviors…

This design case describes design decisions and their impacts during three redesigns of an educational game called the "Rocks and Minerals Challenge." This game was developed as a laboratory supplement for the rocks and minerals component of a university-based geology course. The game has evolved through three distinct design phases:…

Undergraduate marketing majors who were enrolled in the senior-level marketing capstone course engaged with current marketing news from credible sources and practiced data visualization as part of a teaching innovation, Fantasy Brand Leagues. The ten-week assignment treated brands like players in a game modeled after Fantasy Football. The…

Computer gaming is a global phenomenon and there has been rapid growth in "serious" games for learning. An emergent body of evidence demonstrates how serious games can be used in primary and secondary school classrooms. Despite the popularity of serious games and their pedagogical potential, there are few specialised frameworks to guide…

The core of instruction is the interaction between the student, the content, and the teacher. Good instructional design accounts for the students' needs and interests by personalizing the core to each student. Video games and simulations are one way to meet student needs and leverage their interests for increased student learning. In the 2011-12…

The Computer Information and Technology Department (CIT) program of Purdue University is offered at our regional campus in Columbus, Indiana. Like many programs throughout the country, we face issues in recruiting new students. Over the last seven to eight years, we have faced declining enrollment, even as our main campus at West Lafayette saw…

John Lamb, a professor of mathematics education and a teacher of high school precalculus, describes how he developed a way to use the elements of the game Angry Birds® as a platform to engage his students with the concepts of parabolas and vectors. The game could be categorized as a type of microworld game in which students interact with the…

The quantum computer game "Schrodinger cat and hounds" is the quantum extension of the well-known classical game fox and hounds. Its main objective is to teach the unique concepts of quantum mechanics in a fun way. "Schrodinger cat and hounds" demonstrates the effects of superposition, destructive and constructive interference, measurements and…

In this article we present an interactive extensible software, "The 7 Keys of the Dragon," for the teaching/learning of Albanian and Russian to students that attend primary and secondary education in Greece with the respective languages as their heritage languages. We address the key challenges we encountered during the conceptualization…

In order to understand the culture of the physical, virtual, and blended spheres that adolescents inhabit, we build on Gee's concept of affinity spaces. Drawing on our ethnographic research of adolescent literacies related to The Hunger Games novels, the Neopets online game, and The Sims videogames, this article explores the nature of…

During the past two decades, the popularity of computer and video games has prompted games to be a source of study for educational applications (Dickey, 2007). The most distinguishing characteristic of games is their capability to engage and motivate their players (Kiili, 2005). Educators started to explore game-based learning by testing…

This paper draws on lessons learned from the development process of the entertainment games industry and discusses how they can be applied to the field of game-based learning. This paper examines policy makers and those wishing to commission or develop games for learning and highlights potential opportunities as well as pitfalls. The paper focuses…

Digital educational games (DEGs) possess the potential of providing an appealing and intrinsically motivating learning context. Usually this potential is either taken for granted or examined through questionnaires or interviews in the course of evaluation studies. However, an "adaptive" game would increase the probability of a DEG being…