Digital games are considered relevant in higher education due to their ability to foster authentic, active and experiential learning opportunities that are of importance in engineering education. However, as a relatively new pedagogical tool, there is the need to understand the perceptions of engineering students as well as to identify factors…

Due to limited laboratory facilities and other constraints, many engineering students may not have the opportunity to engage with practical, hands-on learning experiences. Although some research suggests that game-based learning can provide students with these pedagogical benefits, much of that work does not directly assess the impact of such…

In this paper, we report the results of a 3-year, quasi-experimental study comparing students' engagement and deep learning of course materials between students who took an undergraduate engineering course that used a video game approach to a control group. The video game, EduTorcs, provided challenges in which students devised control algorithms…

Society is continually evolving and the needs of current generations of students are changing, deriving from the ongoing digital evolution of the whole of society. Gamification tools are increasingly being implemented in education, since previous studies have demonstrated their usefulness to foster motivation, particularly in the case of…

Agency, or the capacity to take intentional actions, is considered one of the primary affordances of virtual reality (VR) for learning. VR is expected to increase learners' agency because it allows for full-body interactivity from a first-person perspective, giving them novel ways of interacting with the digital environment. Yet, agency in…

Video games have become an important element of contemporary life. The need to use them in the field of education has given rise to the appearance of serious video games, which have been specially designed to achieve objectives at different educational levels and generate spaces for educational innovation. The purpose of this work is to…

At an unrivaled and enduring pace, computing has transformed the world, resulting in demand for a universal fourth foundation beyond reading, writing, and arithmetic: computational thinking (CT). Despite increasingly widespread acceptance of CT as a crucial competency for all, transforming education systems accordingly has proven complex. The…

Contribution: This article presents the design of in-game tools to support learning within an educational video game and investigates the impact of tool usage on engineering students' performance in an introductory digital circuit design course. Background: Despite the level of appeal of video games to college students, there is a lack of…

The use of educational digital games as supplemental tools to course instruction materials has increased over the last several decades and especially since the COVID-19 pandemic. Though these types of instructional games have been employed in the majority of STEM disciplines, less is known about how diverse populations of students interpret and…

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…

The aim of the 2018 International Association for Development of the Information Society (IADIS) Cognition and Exploratory Learning in the Digital Age (CELDA) conference was to address the main issues concerned with evolving learning processes and supporting pedagogies and applications in the digital age. There have been advances in both cognitive…