An Open Perspective for Educational Games

Abstract

In the field of computers in education, educational digital games have potential to involve more issues of motivation and involvement, considering their possibilities for higher level of interaction and engagement. However, years of research have shown that the impact of educational games is lower than expected, especially the difficulty to adapt them to different educational contexts, such as with different educational, linguistic, cultural and social aspects. In that sense, this article presents an open perspective on the development of educational games, emphasizing the challenges related to their development and their effective potential for use in education, proposing that they be designed as Open Educational Resources (OER). From this perspective, it is expected to support communities that would aggregate developers (programmers, game designers, media producers, etc.) and users (teachers and students) so they can work collaboratively in creating educational games in an open way.

Effects of Using Game-Based Learning to Improve the Academic Performance and Motivation in Engineering Studies

“…It has to be mentioned that adapting game strategies to specific subject objectives is often tricky and requires a detailed analysis on the different effects caused on the learning process (Dicheva et al, 2018; Ibanez et al, 2015; Piteira et al, 2017; Silveira & Orlando Villalba-Condori, 2018). The goal of this paper is to analyse the effects on the performance and motivation of the students when introducing GBL techniques in subjects that include complex technical contents.…”