The literature reports that while digital educational games are used in the elementary classroom, they are rarely, if ever, used in the upper secondary mathematics classroom. In order to investigate this situation, a survey was conducted to determine what upper secondary school mathematics teachers think about digital games and what obstacles and…

The aim of this study is to examine the implementation of online games and interactive book reading applications for individuals with autism with maternal participation. For this purpose, this case was studied with the support of mother participation with a 2-year-old child diagnosed with autism of a family living in the Netherlands who immigrated…

Evaluation professionals need to be nimble and innovative in their approaches in order to be relevant and provide useful evidence to decision-makers, stakeholders, and society in the crowded public policy landscape. In this article, we offer serious games as a method that can be employed by evaluators to address three persisting challenges in…

Although the use of games and game elements other than pure entertainment has been studied in several academic fields, studies on completely gamified courses for foreign language learning in secondary schools are still scarce. This exploratory research paper contributes to a better understanding of the affordances of mobile gamification in Foreign…

Two studies examined when and why children (10-13 years) help ethnic in-group and out-group peers. In Study 1 (n = 163) children could help an out-group or in-group peer with a word-guessing game by entering codes into a computer. While children evaluated the out-group more negatively than the in-group, they helped out-group peers "more"…

This study introduces the concept of microgames to support situated learning in order to foster situational awareness (SA) of planners in seaport container terminals. In today's complex working environments, it is often difficult to develop the required level of understanding of a given situation, described as situational awareness. A container…

Serious games foster the acquisition of complex problem-solving skills. Assessment of such skills should be in line with instruction, and within a serious game environment its content validity should equal face-to-face assessment. Research on assessment in serious gaming has remained rather scarce. This article shows how assessment can be…

The authors present the methodological background to and underlying research design of an ongoing research project on the scientific evaluation of serious games and/or computer-based simulation games (SGs) for advanced learning. The main research questions are: (1) what are the requirements and design principles for a comprehensive social…

Writing down spoken number words (transcoding) is an ability that is predictive of math performance and related to working memory ability. We analysed these relationships in a large sample of over 25,000 children, from kindergarten to the end of primary school, who solved transcoding items with a computer adaptive system. Furthermore, we…

This publication demonstrates the potential of dynamic literate environments and the importance of nurturing a culture of reading and writing, examining four different contexts: digital environments, intergenerational settings, community libraries and prisons. The case studies, from UNESCO's Effective Literacy and Numeracy Practices Database…

Initiated in response to informal reports of vocabulary gains from gamers at universities in New Zealand and the Netherlands, this qualitative study explored how English language learners autonomously learn vocabulary while playing massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). Using research processes inherent in Grounded Theory, data…

One of the facets of geographic literacy is the ability to think in a structured way about geographic relationships. Geospatial technologies offer many opportunities to stimulate students' geographic relational thinking. The question is: How can these opportunities be effectuated? This paper discusses the results of a process-oriented experiment…

The training of tactical decision making increasingly occurs through serious computer games. A challenging aspect of designing such games is the modelling of human emotions. Two studies were performed to investigate the relation between fidelity and human emotion recognition in virtual human characters. Study 1 compared five versions of a virtual…

The goal of this study was to explore how students debate with their peers within a designed context using a digital dialogue game, and whether their epistemic beliefs are significant to the outcomes. Epistemic beliefs are known to colour student interactions within argumentative discourse, leading some students to hold back from interactions. By…

With children using digital media at ever younger ages, media-education becomes a pressing issue for parents. As there is hardly any research on how parents guide the online activities of toddlers and young children an internet-survey was held among 792 Dutch parents of children aged between 2 and 12 years. Factor analysis revealed that for the…