This dissertation follows a manuscript-style format, beginning with an introduction and literature review, followed by three distinct studies and a concluding section. All three studies use "Lucky Codes," an educational board game designed to foster computational thinking skills in elementary students, as the intervention. The first…

Gamification has proven to be effective in engaging and encouraging people to work towards and achieve goals. Many students struggle to focus on schoolwork, due to a lack of interest, lack of understanding, or other factors unique to the student. Applying gamification elements to education can help engage these students in learning their course…

Earthquakes are the movements of the earth's crust that originate in the ground, and they are one of the natural disasters that frighten people because they occur suddenly and often cause great loss of life and property. Earthquake natural disaster is the reality of Turkey and it is important to raise public awareness on this issue. Thanks to the…

Prior studies on game-based learning provide limited and mixed results in the transfer of skills learned during game play to contexts outside of the game. This study tested the effects of playing a blocked-based programming educational game implemented with in-game cognitive supports on students' ability to learn and apply computational thinking…

This paper presents a new developed methodology for teaching and learning subjects that although are very important in the modern digital society are neglected in high school education programs: cybersecurity and cyber safety. A Study among the EU high schools in 2021-2022 revealed that computer science teachers are not regularly upgrading their…

Purpose: Since youngsters are being extensively engaged with digital devices these days, integrating digital technologies into food and nutrition education programs, stands out as a viable method. The current systematic review aimed to assess the available literature on the effectiveness of digital edutainment games on nutrition behavior of…

Longitudinal studies on mainstream children and training studies in the dyslexic population suggest that visual attention span (VAS) abilities contribute to reading acquisition. We evaluated to what extent VAS training in beginning readers might enhance later literacy skills. A large cohort of 453 children was followed from the beginning to the…

Assignments and tests are the main forms of evaluation in the educational process, students usually lose interest in boring exercises during course learning. In spired of elements from human-computer battle game, a course test system is designed to encourage students to take tests more frequently and actively to achieve better learning effect,…

Board games are enjoying increased popularity with thousands of new games introduced annually. The most popular mechanical element of board games is rolling dice and economic topics rank in the top three most common board game themes. The dice game Left, Center, Right employs dice and is easy to learn. This essay presents a variety of social…

Over the past 15 years, various government agencies in Singapore have supported educational game development and research, producing multiple digital games (e.g., "Legends of Alkhemia," "Statecraft X"), and non-digital games (e.g., "Green City Blues," "Money Matters"). Although these games had been…

The literature reports that while digital educational games are used in the elementary classroom, they are rarely, if ever, used in the upper secondary mathematics classroom. In order to investigate this situation, a survey was conducted to determine what upper secondary school mathematics teachers think about digital games and what obstacles and…

College students are reflective of a culturally diverse population and hold a wide range of cultural identities. As such, faculty and campus activities professionals alike, are constantly striving to meet the needs of an increasingly diverse student population. Socioeconomic status (SES) and social class are cultural variables that need more…

Studies of educational games often treat them as "black boxes" (Black and Wiliam in Phi Delta Kappan 80: 139-48, 1998; Buckley et al. in Int J LearnTechnol 5:166-190, 2010; Buckley et al. in J Sci Educ Technol 13: 23-41, 2010) and measure their effectiveness by exposing a treatment group of students to the game and comparing their…

Game Learning Analytics can be used to conduct evidence-based evaluations of the effect that serious games produce on their players by combining in-game user interactions and traditional evaluation methods. We illustrate this approach with a case-study where we conduct an evidence-based evaluation of a serious game's effectiveness to increase…

Australian primary school teachers have reported that they use games frequently in teaching mathematics. In this paper, the authors discuss the game mechanics of five types of whole-class games that can be particularly powerful for supporting mathematical thinking and student engagement in mathematics.