This research examined how a Digital Escape Room (DER) about accessibility contributed to the potential change of faculty behavioral intentions toward developing accessible online course content. This paper describes the design of the DER and a pilot study of its initial implementation that consisted of two phases, (1 a usability test with 3…

The purpose of this research was to establish a case for the use of serious simulation games as a tool to enhance the learning of sales leadership skills. The study provides taxonomy around serious simulation games as a specific modality at the intersection of serious games and simulation games, which have a focus toward education. A literature…

The goal of this research was to design, develop, and evaluate VRI (Virtual Reality Instructional) and ARI (Augmented Reality Instructional) modules to supplement traditional education and training. The objectives of this research were to (1) design and develop the VRI modules for use in immersive and non-immersive environments; (2) evaluate those…

This study used a quasi-experimental approach with a nonequivalent control group posttest-only design to examine the effectiveness of a virtual escape room on the acquisition of nursing students' knowledge related to leadership nursing content. Additionally, the study measured the students' perceptions of the escape room activity as an effective…

Following the social turn in Second Language Acquisition (SLA) in the 1990s (Block, 2003), researchers have increasingly focused on the emic perspective of learners. As a result, identity, subjectivity, and agency have come to the forefront in SLA research. In an effort to afford learners the means to negotiate meaning more freely and to position…

This dissertation takes up the topic of simulations in social studies education. Though simulations are taken up widely by social studies educators, and though they are described as best practice in social studies standards documents and teacher evaluation rubrics, the term lacks specificity. Additionally, design, research, and implementation…

Clinically appropriated and procedurally correct hand hygiene is performed less than 50% of the time by health professionals resulting in suboptimal patient care. The use of serious simulation games has been suggested to provide emerging health professional students the opportunity to practice proper hand hygiene behaviors to individualized,…

Building on the need for developing educational responses to the impact of data practices in our everyday lives, a new curriculum called Nayah-Irú was designed and implemented in the context of five alternative schools in Uruguay. Nayah-Irú aimed at fostering Critical Data Literacy (CDL) using speculative civic literacies, helping youth and…

Social studies instructional experts have called for a move from a knowledge-based curriculum to conceptually-driven inquiry, though tools for educators in meeting this challenge are lacking. Simulations are potentially a powerful inquiry tool to transform students' ways of seeing the world through realistic interactions with complex social…

Embodiment is a concept that has gained widespread usage within the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community in recent years. In a general sense, embodiment is the notion that cognition arises not just from the mind, but also through our bodies' physical and social interactions with the world around us. HCI has employed this body-centric…

Currently, educational games are designed with the educational content as the primary factor driving the design of the game. While this may seem to be the optimal approach, this design paradigm causes multiple issues. For one, the games themselves are often not engaging as game design principles were put aside in favor of increasing the…

Edutainment refers to curriculum and instruction designed with a clear educational purpose, including multi-faceted virtual learning game design. Tools such as the Jacob's Ladder pre-production design tactic have been developed to ensure that voices of both engineers and educators are heard. However, it is unclear how development team members…

Systemic sustainable change does not happen overnight but begins with the diffusion of knowledge and changing of attitudes (Rogers, 2010). Additionally, games can educate while adjusting attitudes (Gee, 2008; Jones, 2008). For these reasons, this project designed a Digital Game-Based Learning (DGBL) prototype to teach about the basic human rights…

Game-based learning has entered the mainstream, yet little research has examined its influence within an early elementary setting, in the subject of history, or within the context of entire curricular unit. This dissertation examines two years' worth of data during which an augmented reality, geolocated mobile game was embedded within a…

This dissertation aims to integrate various learning approaches, i.e., multiple literacies, experiential learning, game-enhanced learning, and global simulation, into an extracurricular module, in which it remodels traditional ways of teaching input, specifically, the lexical- and grammatical-only approaches of business English at a private…