The increasingly neoliberal course of Higher Education is linked to rises in student anxiety around assessment and increased fear of the consequences of failure. Making mistakes is an inevitable part of any learning process (and of life generally) and managing failure in a productive and positive way is crucial for success and wellbeing beyond…

Play has been discussed by mathematicians and mathematics educators as essential to mathematical progress and has been widely acknowledged to have a role in learning. Yet, play is rarely acknowledged, leveraged, or studied for mathematics learners beyond early childhood. Moreover, there are theoretical and empirical challenges with designing for…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to understand the role of perplexity in young players' experiences within an educational videogame and how reflective thinking can help them to get out of perplexing scenarios. Design/methodology/approach: We used a constructivist grounded theory approach and the lenses of Dewey's conceptualization of…

Given the connection between problem-solving and computational thinking (CT), studying the connections between these two constructs is critical. This study focused on students' computational problem-solving strategies, specifically how they applied conditional logic to solve CT-related puzzles within a game-based learning environment called…

The purpose of this research was to gain a better understanding of the impact of game mechanics on developing collaborative problem solving (CPS) skills. CPS skills are important for the complex work environments of the 21st century, and games appear to provide potential learning experiences where such skills can develop. The research questions of…

Interprofessional education is a key component of preparing health professional students to become collaborative practice-ready graduates. In the design and delivery of activities, educators seek ways to enhance student participation and learning with the goal of developing students' collaborative practice capabilities. Traditionally, learning…

A digital escape room is a gamified activity in which students work collaboratively to solve a series of tasks or riddles within a certain amount of time. They are typically embedded in a story framework at the end of which students need to "escape" an imaginary scenario. Students explore the target culture while using the target…

Traditional teaching methods often limit interactive learning, negatively impacting students' motivation and learning achievement. Moreover, fostering collaborative awareness and problem-solving skills is crucial for developing the core competencies of future nursing professionals. To address these challenges, this study proposed an escape…

The quest in the "Mirror Mirror on the Wall, Which Chiral Drug Is the Fairest of Them All?" escape room activity was to find an enantiomer drug that cures a "sleeping sickness". Based loosely on the story of Snow White, first-year pharmacy student pairs had 50 min to solve gamified stereochemistry quizzes (tasks 1-4), collect…

Chemical escape rooms (ChEsRms) are educational games in which students use their brain, chemical knowledge, intuition, and a bit of luck to solve a mystery. At the Weizmann Institute, we have developed ChEsRms that are implemented by teachers in their classes. Since the COVID-19 pandemic stopped all the educational activities that took place in…

While the development of creativity, or creative thinking, in mathematics is considered important by many researchers, there are several difficulties in implementing creative tasks, especially before secondary school. Within the original context of a mathematical escape game, this paper reports two episodes exemplifying the difficulties met by…

At an unrivaled and enduring pace, computing has transformed the world, resulting in demand for a universal fourth foundation beyond reading, writing, and arithmetic: computational thinking (CT). Despite increasingly widespread acceptance of CT as a crucial competency for all, transforming education systems accordingly has proven complex. The…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of cognitive training (CT) using mobile applications on attentional control and impulsivity among pre-service teachers. Pre-service teachers were divided into two groups: experimental (n=25) and control (n=14) groups, they were selected from a large sample (n=718). Over 28 sessions, the…

Pattern recognition is an important skill in computational thinking. In this study, an equation puzzle game was developed by combining pattern recognition with algebraic reasoning, and scaffolding was designed to support learners' learning. Sixty participants were enrolled in this study, divided into a control group and an experimental group to…

This teaching brief describes an engaging, in-class exercise that introduces genetic algorithms as well as advanced Excel functions and capabilities by modeling the familiar Sudoku puzzle. Student groups are first asked to manually solve a given puzzle and then translate that solution methodology to a spreadsheet model. This exercise can be used…