This study examines the effectiveness of a collaborative support method in enhancing programming learning outcomes in a serious game. The game Code Hasp was developed to facilitate the comparison between two support methods, worked examples and a collaborative peer support approach. A total of 111 elementary school students participated, divided…

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…

There is substantial evidence that incorporating interactive environments for game-based instruction has a significant potential to support the development of computational thinking and programming skills in primary education students. However, it is not clear whether a simulation game (SG) with different user interface elements, created via…

Previous studies have found positive effects of Game-Based Learning for mathematics. While most studies assume that this effect is explained by the presence of flow/immersion during games, this has not yet been established. The aim of the current study is to verify if immersion indeed is associated with mathematical skills improvement when using a…

The purpose of this research was to investigate the impact of two educational interventions, a program based on Full Immersive Virtual Reality games and a Typical Training program, in Selective Attention (SA) of children aged 8-10 years old. Forty-eight girls of elementary school from the city of Komotini, in Greece, participated in this study.…

This research aims to conduct a bibliometric study to describe how game-based educational research is structured and how it has evolved over time. For this purpose, bibliometric analysis has been used to analyze 4980 publications indexed by the Elsevier SCOPUS database between 1967 and May 2021. The related publications were evaluated by analyzing…

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…

Digital educational games (DEGs) constitute an effective teaching approach, particularly when they are used in combination with collaborative learning scenarios. However, when changes are made in the teaching and learning process, teachers are responsible to apply and realize them in practice. Therefore, it is vital to understand their views and…

This paper aims to explore the impact of freeform digital games on primary school students' narrative skills, in terms of linguistic cohesion and semantic coherence, compared to other digital media, such as formally structured digital games and movies. A total of 128 Year 6 Primary school students participated in this research. Initially, students…

The purpose of this study was to observe record and evaluate the psychomotor development and its relationship to children's gender and age on attending public and private kindergartens in Greece. The sample consisted of 898 children (487 boys' 54% and 411 girls 46%) aged 64 ± 9 months from 64 kindergarten schools. A set of 18 MOT tests Zimmer and…

Background: Owing to the exponential growth of three-dimensional (3D) environments amongst researchers and educators to create simulation games (SGs) in primary education, there is a growing interest to examine their potential support in computer science courses instead of visual programming environments. Objectives: This study explores the…

The effective teaching of the concept of programming, where critical thinking is an important factor, is not so easy in secondary education. New teaching approaches, including, game-based learning, may provide a solution due to their inclusion of more fun and diverse activities but they still lack the active participation of the students in the…

In the following research review, 57 articles were analysed to get an insight into research in the field of computational thinking and programming in K-12. The results show that empirical research regarding programming and computational thinking is prevalent in the USA and Greece. The articles were published in 43 different academic journals. A…

Aim/Purpose: As e-Learning becomes increasingly pervasive, students' engagement in online settings emerges as a central challenge, as it is often more demanding to ensure in this context. The core importance of engagement for e-Learning, places a focus on various instruments and strategies that can be deployed to foster its enhancement.…

Aim/Purpose: This work examines which factors influence user views on the learning effectiveness of serious games. For that matter, a model was developed and tested. Background: Although the impact of serious games on learning is their most widely ex-amined aspect, research is spread thin across a large number of studies having little in common in…