A time sequence-oriented concept map approach to developing educational computer games for history courses

Abstract

Concept maps have been recognized as an effective tool for students to organize their knowledge; however, in history courses, it is important for students to learn and organize historical events according to the time of their occurrence. Therefore, in this study, a time sequence-oriented concept map approach is proposed for developing a game-based environment to facilitate students' learning of historical events and their organization during the gaming process. With this approach, students can easily learn the precedence relationships among the historical events that occurred in different time periods with the time sequence-oriented concept map. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, a historical role-playing game has been developed for an elementary school history course to examine the students' performance in terms of learning motivation, self-efficacy and learning achievements. A subject unit, the "Siege of Fort Zeelandia by Zheng Cheng-Gong," was chosen as the history topic. The results show that the proposed approach can significantly enhance the students' learning achievement, but did not affect their learning motivation or self-efficacy for the history course. As a consequence, it is concluded that students can benefit from concept maps in terms of enhancing their learning achievement, but they do not necessarily enjoy using concept maps in game-based learning activities.

Enhancing achievement and interest in mathematics learning through Math-Island

“…Knowledge mapping has the advantage of providing students concrete content through explicit knowledge graphics (Ebener et al 2006). Previous studies have shown that the incorporation of knowledge structures into educational games could effectively enhance students' achievement without affecting their motivation and self-efficacy (Chu et al 2015). For this reason, this study attempted to visualize the structure of knowledge in an educational game.…”

Promoting children's inquiry performances in alternate reality games: A mobile concept mapping‐based questioning approach

“…Researchers have found that flow is positively related to children's learning performance and motivation for continuous learning (Cheng et al, 2021). Besides, flow associates with children's divergent thinking which benefits their creative problem-solving abilities (Chu et al, 2015). Many studies have highlighted the importance of challenge-skill balance to promote children's flow experience (Perttula et al, 2017).…”

“…Concept mapping supports children to connect relevant concepts and realise abstract concepts in knowledge construction, which enhances information organisation and memory to improve learning efficiency (Wang et al, 2016). Previous research showed that ARGs which incorporate the concept mapping approach can improve children's learning performance more than the conventional game approach (Chu et al, 2015). With mobile concept mapping-based approaches in ARGs, children can share and synthesise different thoughts from others to improve their collective efficacy (Lin et al, 2016).…”

“…Researchers have found that concept mapping decreased the efforts of learning, which may be helpful to reach the challenge-skill balance of ARGs to enhance children's flow experiences (Furtado et al, 2018). However, previous research did not find significant differences in comparison with the conventional game approach because of the low flow state (Chu et al, 2015). Hence, there is still a need to examine the effects of concept mapping on flow experience.…”

Role-Playing Game Based Assessment to Fractional Concept in Second Grade Mathematics

“…Therefore, its application in education increases students' sense of participation and supports effective learning (Shih et al, 2010). As the RPG background can be set in ancient times or in foreign countries, it has been applied in learning activities related to history (Chua, Yang, & Chen, 2015) and foreign languages (Cornillie, Clarebout, & Desmet, 2012). Compared with other types of games, the requirement in RPGs to complete certain tasks in order to advance to the next level effectively enables students to acquire problemsolving abilities (Liu et al, 2014).…”