A concurrent triangulation mixed-method research design was used to investigate 19 casual gamers' or non-gamers' use of a popular massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), Everquest 2, as an alternative pedagogical tool to support communicative use of the English language. This study poses that MMORPGs could serve as a virtually rich…

Educators and experts alike have come to a growing realization that academic factors alone do not tell the whole story of what it means to successfully navigate the educational system through high school and into higher education or the workplace. This national report from "Education Week" investigates the role that student engagement…

An achievement gap between Anglo and Mexican American students is profound in many school districts. The lack of academic vocabulary that many Mexican American students possess is a major constituent that contributes to this educational gap. Conversely, children who enter school with limited vocabulary find reading, difficult, resist reading,…

Researchers and instructional designers are exploring the possibilities of using video games to support STEM education in the U.S., not only because they are a popular media form among youth, but also because well-designed games often leverage the best features of inquiry learning. Those interested in using games in an educational capacity may…

Can we learn socially and academically valuable concepts and skills from video games? How can we best teach the "gamer generation?" This accessible book describes how educators and curriculum designers can harness the participatory nature of digital media and play. The author presents a comprehensive model of games and learning that integrates…

This study is an exploratory study of the relationship between collaboration and mathematics and game outcomes in a video game aimed at teaching concepts related to rational numbers. The sample included 243 middle school students who played the video game either with one partner or individually for 40 minutes. Results suggest that participants…

Despite the growing number of books designed to radically reconsider the educational value of video games as powerful learning tools, there are very few practical guidelines conveniently available for prospective history and social studies teachers who actually want to use these teaching and learning tools in their classes. As the games and…

Over the past few years a growing body of research has highlighted the potential for educational video games to foster highly engaged, effective learning in the classroom. These research reports from organizations such as the Federation of American Scientists, the National Science Foundation, and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop…

Video games have become an essential part of the way people play and learn. While an increasing number of people are using games to learn in informal environments, their acceptance in the classroom as an instructional activity has been mixed. Successes in informal learning have caused supporters to falsely believe that implementing them into the…

The "Theory of Special Relativity" is widely regarded as a difficult topic for learners in physics to grasp, as it reformulates fundamental conceptions of space, time and motion, and predominantly deals with situations outside of everyday experience. In this paper, we describe embedding the physics of relativity into a computer game, and…

The first part of this study shows that there is increased support for using video games in the classroom from different stakeholders, namely students, teachers and parents. The potential role that video games can play in the classroom learning process needs to be more well defined. There is a dire need for research work under experimental…

Based on PISA 2009 data, this article studies the relationship between students' computer use and their achievement in reading, mathematics and science in 23 countries. After having categorised computer use into a set of different activities according to the skills they involve, we correlate students' PISA test-scores with an index capturing the…

This dissertation explores a business, higher education and public school partnership between the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB), the Wharton School of Business, and the Graduate School of Education (GSE) at the University of Pennsylvania. Beginning three years ago in September 2007, the collective task was to create an online…

Role Game is a co-located CSCL video game played by three students sitting at one machine sharing a single screen, each with their own input device. Inspired by video console games, Role Game enables students to learn by doing, acquiring social abilities and mastering subject matter in a context of co-located collaboration. After describing the…

The essay is a conceptual analysis from an instructional design perspective exploring the feasibility of using three-dimensional digital game-based learning (3D-DGBL) environments to assist in second language acquisition (SLA). It examines the shared characteristics of narrative within theories of situated cognition, context-based approaches to…