Previous research showed that the parents acknowledged the technology's benefits for their young children's learning, however, they are still worried about the extended screen time, lack of physical activity and lack of social interactions. To address these concerns, we developed Kid Space to enable pedagogically appropriate technology use for…

Recent years have seen a surge of calls for personalization of education. Automatised adaptivity in serious games has been advocated as a potential instantiation of such calls. Yet little is known about the extent to which personalised learning through automatised adaptivity poses an advantage for language learning over generalised teacher-led…

The current research is conducted in the context of Second Life (SL) users in Scottsville, Pietermaritzburg, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The research uses the Symbolic Interactionism Theory (SIT), a social science based theory as theoretical framework to underpin it and help inform the research. The overriding purpose is to analyze evidence of…

Although competition is regarded as a powerful motivator in game-based learning, it might have a negative influence, such as damage to confidence, on students who lose the competition. In this paper, we propose an indirect approach, substitutive competition, to alleviate such negative influences. The approach is used to develop a My-Pet v3 system,…

This research study assessed the effectiveness of a three-dimensional mathematics game, DimensionM, through a pretest-posttest control group quasi-experimental design. Participants consisted of 437 eighth graders. The classrooms were randomly assigned either to the treatment group that utilized DimensionM as a supplement to regular classroom…

Describes a computer simulation designed to examine secondary school students' strategies in solving a physics problem involving the velocity of a rocket. Students' beliefs about dynamics are discussed, use of the LOGO programing language to explore the idea of velocity is described, and ways in which simulations can support teachers' diagnostic…