Serious games are a growing field in academic research and they are considered an effective tool for education. Game-based learning invokes motivation and engagement in students resulting in effective instructional outcomes. An essential aspect of a serious game is the method of support for presenting the teaching material and providing feedback.…

This study examines the embodied ways in which learners monitor their cognition while learning about exponential functions in an immersive virtual reality (VR) based game, "Pandemic" by Prisms of Reality. Traditionally, metacognitive monitoring has been assessed through behavioural traces and verbalised instances. When learning in VR,…

This study aimed to determine the effectiveness of customized exergames, with different cognitive loads, on static and dynamic postural control compared with traditional exercises in a group of adolescents. The participants in this study were 30 healthy adolescents, aged 12-14 years, divided into three groups. Each group trained for two weeks (2…

Scientific knowledge is often abstract and challenging, making it difficult for students to apply these concepts effectively. Digital game-based learning (DGBL) offers an engaging and immersive approach, but the fixed resources and predetermined learning paths in most games limit its ability to adapt to individual learners' needs. Large language…

With the growing prevalence of mobile apps for self-directed learning, educational games increasingly find their place in everyday routines, becoming accessible to a broad audience. Despite the growing ease of content creation by artificial intelligence computing, the challenge of designing effective and engaging Serious Games remains,…

While role-playing games and personalized learning have been regarded as effective tools to improve students' learning, incorporating personalized learning into role-playing games is challenging and approaches are limited to cognitive and motivational variables. Aiming at expanding approaches to incorporate personalization into role-playing games,…

Serious games are considered an effective method to engage students in programming education and have been increasingly used in classrooms. An important part of the learning process with serious games involves the presentation of the new concepts and the provided support to encounter student difficulties. Although the most common approach is the…

This study aimed to investigate the differences in learners' emotion, cognitive load, and cognitive performance among various scaffolding DGBLs, and the influences of emotion and cognitive load on cognitive performance when using DGBLs. Participants were 97 adult learners from some community college, randomly divided into the control group with 32…

There has been a little research on emotion, cognitive load, or learning performance for digital game-based learning (DGBL). However, there is still a dearth of research on investigating the interactive effects of scaffolding DGBL and cognitive style on the above three outcomes. Participants were 97 middle-aged and elder adults from a community…

In line with the attention-to-affect model, this study employed a game that encompasses Gestalt perception to explore how extraneous cognitive load (ECL) and gameplay anxiety correlate with attitude towards exploitative learning and attitude towards explorative learning as students play the Visual-Saliency game (VSG) with images of artworks. The…

In this study, we investigated whether playing an escape room game after explicit instruction (instruction-first group, N = 20) is more effective to learn about copyright and media law than playing the game before explicit instruction (problem-solving-first group, N = 21). This is an important question as escape room games are complex,…

Computational thinking (CT) is an essential 21st century skill for people to succeed in the increasingly technological (and interconnected) world. Researchers have explored different interventions to teach students CT skills (e.g., Scratch and robotics), but digital game-based learning is relatively under-researched. A critical issue to address in…

Active inquiry plays a key role in science education. To facilitate children's motivation, alternate reality games are applied to engage children actively in inquiry in authentic learning contexts. However, the complexity of real-world contexts and the ambiguity of game puzzles increase the difficulty for children to conduct effective inquiries.…

The boom of the 4.0 industrial revolution and the Covid-19 pandemic have changed the teaching and learning process, where digital learning environments have become increasingly necessary and convenient. The application of game-based learning (GBL) provides many benefits, such as helping to improve the quality of the mathematics teaching and…

Game-based learning is supposed to motivate learners. However, to what degree does motivation driven by interest in playing an instructional game affect learning outcomes compared to motivation driven by interest in the very learning process? This is not known. In this study with a unique design and intervention, young adults (N = 128; a…