Videogames are a powerful medium that curriculum designers can use to create narratively rich worlds for achieving educational goals. In these worlds, youth can become scientists, doctors, writers, and mathematicians who critically engage complex disciplinary content to transform a virtual world. Toward illuminating this potential, the authors…

Based on a significant increase in correspondence to the author from parents, teachers and psychologists concerning "addiction" to online video games like "World of Warcraft", this paper provides a brief overview of the main issues surrounding excessive video game playing among adolescents. As an aid to educational psychologists, and based on two…

Games technology in the form of hand-held game consoles (HGCs) when focussed on specific academic skill development has the capacity to engage students in learning and in turn produce positive academic results. This current research explores teacher perceptions of the implementation of HGCs to enhance the development of mental maths skills (namely…

This review synthesises research on digital games and science learning as it supports the goals for science proficiency outlined in the report by the US National Research Council on science education reform. The review is organised in terms of these research-based goals for science proficiency in light of their alignment with current science…

This work explores the use of multimodal communication in a community of expert "World of Warcraft"® players and its impact on politeness, identity, and relationships. Players in the community regularly communicated using three linguistic modes quasi-simultaneously: text chat, voice chat, and face-to-face interaction. Using the…

Recent psycholinguistic findings showed that (a) a multi-modal phonetic training paradigm that encodes visual, interactive information is more effective in training L2 learners' perception of novel categories, (b) decreasing the acoustic variance of a phonetic dimension allows the learners to more effectively shift the perceptual weight towards…

The New Media Consortium (NMC) and the National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development (NISOD), with the generous support of Dell and Intel, have jointly released the "Technology Outlook for Community, Technical, and Junior Colleges 2013-2018: An NMC Horizon Project Sector Analysis." This report applies the process developed…

The assessment cycle of "evidence-centered design" (ECD) provides a framework for treating an educational video game or simulation as an assessment. One of the main steps in the assessment cycle of ECD is the identification of the key features of student performance. While this process is relatively simple for multiple choice tests, when…

With the rise of the so-called military-entertainment complex, critical scholars note with alarm the integration of the political economies of entertainment companies and the military, in particular its potential influence on millions of young people who consume its concomitant films, toys and especially video games. Seen from a broad perspective,…

Research on parental monitoring of children's media use suggests parents can reduce the negative effects of media exposure on children, although this research is rarely conducted with elementary school children and leaves open questions about whether parents or children are better reporters. Participants were 1,323 children, their parents, and…

Background: High school students involved in athletics may face additional stressors and engage in more problematic behaviors, such as drinking, dieting, and gambling, than non-athletes, especially as they near the end of their high school experience. Studies have, in general, found mixed results as to whether sports serve a protective factor or…

Grounded in our work on designing game-based curriculum, this paper begins with a theoretical articulation of transformational play. Students who play transformationally become protagonists who use the knowledge, skills, and concepts of the educational content to first make sense of a situation and then make choices that actually transform the…

One of the key features that draws many people to play video games is the fact that they are interactive. Video games allow the user to be actively engaged and in control of the action (Prensky, 2006). Seventh grade students at Canonsburg Middle School are actively engaging in the creation of video games. The students are engaged at a much deeper…

While career and technical education (CTE) has been an important part of the U.S. education system for decades, other countries have been slower to adopt and develop similar types of training. Realizing that CTE is crucial to developing homegrown talent capable of competing in a 21st century economy, countries like China are reaching out to…

In this article we describe a semester-long project, based on the popular video game series Guitar Hero, designed to introduce upper-level undergraduate statistics students to statistical research. Some of the goals of this project are to help students develop statistical thinking that allows them to approach and answer open-ended research…