Beyond Play: Conceptualising the Capability of a Good Digital Game to Stimulate Interest in STEM

Abstract

Digital games are one of the potential pedagogical approaches within STEM teaching and learning. The main idea behind using digital games in STEM contexts is to enhance the children’s conceptual understanding and to increase their interest in STEM. The interest in STEM is still an unsolved global issue. Most studies looking into digital games show there to be positive implications when it comes to STEM learning. This gap and the uncorrelated scenario from both the theoretical and practical perspectives need to both be solved. Here we conceptualise the usefulness of STEM digital games for stimulating an interest in STEM, particularly among children from a design perspective. The previous studies are the main qualitative sources for the interpretation of the main argument in this paper. As result, digital games have a strong empirically supportive foundational basis that acts as a medium to stimulate interest. To achieve this, STEM digital games should be designed to be of better quality. Good STEM digital games will contribute to better STEM learning outcomes and meaningful gaming experiences that can contribute to the interest in STEM. This study proposes a comprehensive framework to understand the purpose of the design and development of STEM digital games.

Media Education through Digital Games: A Review on Design and Factors Influencing Learning Performance

“…However, the three-design method practice can be simplified towards more universal attributes. These review findings correlated with the idea in most recent studies [25,86], where the elements within the discovered approaches can be extracted and grouped into theory, learning strategy, pedagogy, learning content, game elements, and game principle design. These six main classifications potentially serve as universal attributes for digital game design for educational purposes.…”

“…Designing and developing games in education is complicated due to the incorporation of educational content, game elements, and entertainment [6,18,24,25]. The purpose is to engage players to the game play and enhance learning.…”

“…In most literature, scholars, academics and game designers discuss the input process of developing good games for educational purposes (Table 1). However, the latest review and conceptualization on digital games for education indicates six universal attributes that contribute to a good game design, as follows: theory, learning strategy, pedagogy, learning content, game elements and game principle design [24,25].…”

Serious educational games for children: A comprehensive framework

“…Determining the content of games is recognized as one of the important aspects of SGs design for children [ 34 , 40 ]. The studies indicated that learning content is identified as a universal attribute in SEGs and plays a crucial contribution in constructing good instructional games [ [48] , [49] , [50] ]. These results show the important role of learning content in children's games.…”

Beyond the Hype: Challenges to Implementing Instructional Technology in Higher Education

“…An analysis of the state of the art indicates that educators are reluctant to adopt this technology for many reasons such as poor understanding of pedagogical issues and difficulties in integrating the technologies with their existing content (Mutambara, Bayaga and Others, 2020;Chaipidech et al, 2021;Gandolfi, Ferdig and Kratcoski, 2021). Furthermore, deploying these technologies in practice is also a challenge and researchers have found that educators lack the required resources and support (Ishak, Din and Hasran, 2021). A lack of student engagement and poor inclusiveness of students has also emerged as challenges (Lee and Choi, 2011;Kayan Fadlelmula, Sellami and Le, 2022).…”