Most game-designers likely stick to the assumption that background music is a design feature for fostering fun and game play. From a psychological point of view, these (intuitive) aspects act upon the intrinsic motivation and the flow experience of players. However, from a pure cognitive perspective on instructional design, background music could…

From the observations of successful entertainment games, it is hypothesized that implementing a single-player option may require a different approach from that in a multiplayer option, in terms of game design. To find out whether this could be true and to understand what the specific approaches could entail for educational games, three separate…

Gamification offers potential for improving students' online discussion quantity and the depth of discussion content. However, very few studies have examined the social network patterns when students are posting and providing peer-feedback to each other in gamification-based environments. In response to those gaps, this study used a learning…

The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) review of the impact of digital technology on learning, "The Impact of Digital Technology on Learning: A Summary for the Education Endowment Foundation. Full Report" (Higgins et al., 2012) (ED612174), found positive benefits but noted that how technology is used (the pedagogy) is key and that…

The integration of emerging technologies in higher education presents a new set of challenges and opportunities for educators. With a growing need for customized lesson plans in online education, educators are rethinking the design and development of their learning environments. "Utilizing Virtual and Personal Learning Environments for…

Using a pre-post design, this study evaluates the association between participating in a science game (NDE) and science energy knowledge and science interest. A survey was used to explore teacher perceptions of the game on their instructional practices. Outcome measures were collected at the individual level and the game was played at the team…

For the thirty-eighth time, the Research and Theory Division of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) is sponsoring the publication of these Proceedings. Papers published in this volume were presented at the annual AECT Convention in Indianapolis, Indiana. The Proceedings of AECT's Convention are published in two…

The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore how the computer is utilized in the daily lives of seven African American male youth in the southeastern region of the United States. Critical pedagogy was selected as the theoretical framework using Paulo Freire ideas of problem-posing education to promote awareness towards using the computer…

This study investigated how playing different types of video games was associated with different values of metacognitive awareness. The target population was first and second-year college students. The study used a survey methodology that employed two self-reporting instruments: the first to estimate a metacognitive-awareness index (MAI), and the…

Educational videogames can be designed to provide instructional feedback that is responsive to specific actions. However, existing research indicates that students tend to ignore videogame feedback and subsequently use less effective help-seeking strategies. Research on help-seeking in learning environments has primarily focused on the role of…

The authors present a learning platform based on a computer game. Learning games combine two industries: education and entertainment, which is often called "Edutainment." The game is realized as a strategic game (similar to Risk[TM]), implemented as a module for Moodle CMS, utilizing Java Applet technology. Moodle is an open-source course…

The idea of learning through games isn't necessarily new. In fact, over the past decade, researchers have been espousing the use of games to help both children and adults learn. But it's only been recently that games have begun to make serious inroads into classrooms. As the world becomes more and more driven by mobile apps and tablet…

Past studies on the issue of learning-theory foundations in game-based learning stressed the importance of establishing learning-theory foundation and provided an exploratory examination of established learning theories. However, we found research seldom addressed the development of the use or failure to use learning-theory foundations and…

In this project, 10 female Japanese students in the "Advanced Interpersonal Communication" course at a Japanese university used smartphone technology and a downloaded application to search for containers (called caches or geocaches) that had been hidden near the university campus by their instructor. The instructor placed different…

According to the Integration of Multiple Patterns hypothesis (IMP; Treiman & Kessler, 2014), the spelling difficulty of a word is affected by the number of cues converging on the correct answer. We tested this hypothesis in children's regular past tense formation in Dutch. Past tenses are formed by adding either-"de"…