"The Ballad of Proxima-B" is an educational RPG that promotes learning and collaboration. Students contribute to world-building and game mechanics, creating fictional worlds and characters, including a dystopian Earth, the planet Proxima-B, and alien races. The game incorporates constructivist, constructionist, and Dynamic Systems Model…

The economic theory of natural resource exploitation predicts that scarcity crises will not arise because forward-looking resource owners will smooth their extraction over time to maximize their profits. The model providing this result can seem opaque and technical to students, but its intuition can be learned from experience. The author shares a…

Games in the classroom is not a new concept. Simulations, board games, and online games are popular methods of incorporating game-based learning or gamification into the classroom. However, newer and more humor-based games popular with student populations, such as Cards Against Humanity, a popular card-based party game, have produced some…

Exercise is essential for mastering mathematics, but it faces two major hurdles. First, students are often not motivated to do their homework. Second, checking traditional homework is a manual and labor-intensive process that becomes harder to support as the number of students increases. We argue that computer games could alleviate both problems.…

A novel game that captures the central dimensions of climate change mitigation as a social dilemma is presented. Students play the role of countries sharing a global atmosphere. In each round, carbon emissions are released and accumulated in the atmosphere, making climate change consequences more severe and difficult to mitigate over time. Without…

In health courses, the students must be familiar with the effects of intravenous solutions on cell volume and function, a topic where there can be learning difficulties and misunderstandings. Since educational games can assist in understanding complex concepts, we created a game relating solution osmolarity and tonicity to red blood cell volume…

Cybersecurity education is becoming increasingly important in modern society, and hands-on practice is an essential element. Although instructors provide hands-on labs in their cybersecurity courses, traditional lab exercises often fail to effectively motivate students. Hence, many instructors desire to incorporate gamification in hands-on…

Electron configuration provides insight into the chemical behaviors of elements and is an important concept for students to master in introductory chemistry. To better strengthen undergraduate students' mastery of electron configurations of atoms and ions, we designed a novel, interactive chemistry game called ChemisTree that uses active-learning…

Sonia Kovalevsky Days (SK Days) are nationally-held outreach events that are commonly organized by local chapters of the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) to encourage young women to continue their study of mathematics. The AWM Student Chapter at Worcester Polytechnic Institute hosted virtual renditions of SK Day for middle school girls…

The educational game "Make or Take" is designed to approach the notoriously challenging topic of organic synthesis in an entertaining and engaging way. In this unique, two-part game, teams of students are given identical lists of several synthetic transformations, each requiring multiple steps to complete. During the first part of the…

Game-based learning has been shown to promote active learning. We have designed a card game termed CountQuest, played on the online platform Zoom, to facilitate the revision of the effective atomic number (EAN) concept for metal complexes previously taught in lectures. This game was played by undergraduate and graduate chemistry students during…

At Play in the Cosmos is a game for University-level Astronomy courses. Designed as a collaboration between the Games + Learning + Society Center, an academic center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Norton & Company, Cosmos is intended to support a "game-first" model of curriculum in which students play the game before…

The field of education was distinctly affected by the development of information and communication technologies, as they can make education more efficient, interactive, and available. Today's students call for new innovative educational approaches. Digital communication technologies are the organic part of their life and they are group-oriented…

The use of games and simulation pedagogy has proliferated across political science and international relations, yet remains fledgling in political theory. Irrespective of discipline, the benefit of games and simulations is well established. However, existing simulations in political philosophy tend to address the teaching of the history of ideas,…

Playing satisfies basic human needs such as deepening social relationships (Melton et al., 2019) and experiencing an ideal self's characteristics (Przybylski et al., 2012). In addition, games foster student engagement through the use of intrinsic motivation, critical thinking skills, and the use of creative problem solving (Boghian et al., 2019;…