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…

This paper describes the design and investigation of a high-school-affiliated esports program based on an enrichment learning model. In it, the authors detail the connections between esports and learning, self-reported impacts of the program and demographic differences among them, students' attitudes toward program features, and equity in results…

There is evidence that video games can promote an inquiry-based and dynamic form of lifelong learning. For example, video games have been shown to support problem-solving processes, developing critical thinking skills, and foster the communication skills necessary for civic engagement. This study examined how scholarship is informed through…

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…

This study focuses on investigating the nature of small-group collaborative interaction in a voice-enhanced multiplayer game called "eScape". The aim was to analyse the elements of groups' collaborative discussion and to explore the nature of the players' shared problem solving activity during the solution critical moments in the game. The data…

Instructional games fluctuate between "restricted play" and "free play." Highly structured games with lots of corrective feedback can be less engaging, whereas unstructured games with minimal feedback can lead to frustration. This mixed methods, formative evaluation study investigated how designers might find the balance between too much and too…

In this study, we explored a new experimental methodology for investigating children's (ages 10 to 14) stances with respect to the ethics of online identity play. We used a scenario about peer identity misrepresentation embedded in a 3D virtual game environment and randomly assigned 265 elementary students (162 female, 103 male) to three…

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…

In an age of technological advancement, video games have been found to be effective teaching aids in middle school science classrooms. A National Science Foundation (NSF) project at Ohio University, known as STEAM, (Science and Technology Enrichment for Appalachian Middle Schoolers), has examined Second Life as a curriculum aid through the design,…

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…

This study investigated the effects of modern educational game playing on middle school students' attitudes towards mathematics, mathematics self-efficacy, and mathematics achievement. Two hundred twenty-five middle school students from four different Title 1 schools in two different counties in the southeastern United States were recruited.…

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…

This research began with the premise that video game play, especially as it relates to participation in persistent virtual worlds, provides fictional spaces where players engage in cognitive and communicative practices that can be personally transformative in prosocial ways. Players' experiences with these worlds are as much defined by the…

In the Playground project, we applied a constructionist learning perspective in order to build a computational learning environment in which children could design and build their own video games. In this paper, we present results from a study where children were given semi-structured programming tasks in an adventure game designed to investigate…