The effectiveness of educational games is contingent upon players staying engaged. When players become stuck, the availability of in-game instructional guidance can help them to overcome obstacles and continue to progress. In this study, we examined the impact of different formats for instructional assets designed to support learners as they play…

Advocates of electronic educational games often cite the work on motivation to support the use of games in education. However, motivation alone is inadequate to facilitate learning. Many of the educational games that focused their game design solely on the motivational effect failed to be either educational or entertaining. Theory and research is…

Video games are one of the fastest growing elements of informal, virtual learning. While their popularity in informal learning situations continues to grow, adoption in the K-12 classrooms remains stagnant. We attribute this to two separate but inter-related phenomena. Game designers and developers fail to incorporate important pedagogic…

Despite the increasing popularity of many commercial video games, this popularity is not shared by educational video games. Modified video games, however, can bridge the gap in quality between commercial and education video games by embedding educational content into popular commercial video games. This study examined how different information…

The widespread proliferation of computer games for children as young as six months of age, merits a reexamination of their manner of use and a review of their facility to provide opportunities for developmental play. This article describes a research study conducted to explore the use of computer games by young children, specifically to…

This paper presents a cognitive model of how interactive multimedia authoring (IMA) affect novices' cognition in object-oriented programming. This model was generated through an empirical study of first year computer science students at the university level being engaged in interactive multimedia authoring of a role-playing game. Clinical…