The idea that games impact learning is not new to pedagogy. Within the last decade, there has been an increased use of games for higher education, social engagement, marketing, and business training. When used within a higher education setting, a gamification system does not operate within a vacuum, but rather is imbued with and embedded in the…

"Technology-enhanced learning" (TEL) is a broad term to denote the incorporation of digital technology to mediate activities that support education. Educational researchers need to validate critical assumptions about any new system that involves TEL early and throughout its development course to make quick, informed, de-risked decisions…

We present results of a grounded analysis of individual interviews in which students play Vector Unknown -- a digital game designed to introduce visualizing vectors, scaling vectors, vector addition, and vector equations, attending to the geometric and algebraic representations of vectors. The game was designed to be used at the beginning of a…

Maths games are fun and engaging, but what messages do these games send to the students in our classrooms? During mathematics lessons children learn more than just mathematics content; they also come to understand what it means to be a learner of mathematics. In this article I discuss the concept of "mathematics learner identity" and use…

"Chair the Fed" is an award-winning online educational game developed by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco to help players learn about monetary policy. Players assume the role of Fed Chair and adjust the federal funds rate to try to achieve low inflation and low unemployment. If successful, they are reappointed to another term.…

The goal of this article is to give examples of high school students exploring parameters of quadratic functions using different tools as a catalyst to discuss the pros and cons and demonstrate the mathematical power of each. The authors illustrate how teachers' learning goals should navigate them toward a productive option.

This article explores why certain types of conversations are effective to develop disciplinary knowledge during video game play while others are not. In particular, we analyze conversations among students playing an educational video game that focuses on the process of viral replication. To do so, we use an emergent qualitative coding strategy. In…

Games can be rich environments for learning and can elicit evidence of students' conceptual understanding and inquiry processes. Illuminating students' content-specific gameplay decisions, or methods of completing game tasks related to a certain domain, requires a context that is open-ended enough for students to make choices that demonstrate…

Given the need for innovative, engaging, and youth-centered approaches to media literacy, as well as the potential of active pedagogies to facilitate youth civic education and efficacy, games emerge as a particularly promising and under-utilized avenue for news literacy education. Our research asks, how might we use game-based learning to tackle…

This brief review provides insights into the recent advances made by the Unity game engine into education and the ways that learning resources can be used to teach novice bioscience students to use the VR/AR affordances of the platform. We present our own practises for implementation of a novel gamification task for final-year bioscience students…

This study examines the design and enactment of a secondary physics unit on electromagnetism. The unit used an educational videogame to support peer dialogic engagement in a Singapore secondary school by engaging learners with qualitative physics phenomena. As an example of game-based learning, the unit includes activities and resources that…

Students often see mathematics as a hard subject because they have to rely on logic, mathematical theories of equations, proofs, and some of math concepts that are difficult to understand, which contributes to students' poor performance and low motivation to learn math. Therefore, the purpose of this quantitative study was to investigate the…

Strong knowledge of foundational mathematics concepts is essential for success in high school mathematics courses, yet only one-third of middle school students in Hawai'i demonstrated proficiency in grade-level mathematics in 2019. Despite this problem, there are only a few studies investigating interventions aimed at addressing gaps in students'…

In this paper, we describe an effort to develop and evaluate an innovative formative assessment to gather evidence about middle school students' argumentation skills. Specifically, this game-enhanced scenario-based assessment (Seaball--Semester at Sea) includes a series of argumentative reasoning activities in the context of an extended scenario…

Serious games, many of which are multi-player games, have been commonly used in information technology education and training. Competition can be intuitively associated with games; however, it is not always considered as a necessary attribute of serious games. Particularly, the learning impact results of competition are mixed. Challenge and…