Learning from games: Does collaboration help?

Abstract

This paper examines whether people benefit more from playing a commercial off-theshelf game in pairs rather than in solitary mode. The basic idea behind this didactic method is that there is a serious risk that solitary game play yields insufficient articulation and explanation for learning to take place. Participants in the experimental condition played a strategy game in collaborative mode (pairs). Solitary play formed the control condition. During game play data were gathered about engagement (ie, flow). Also, the dialogues of the pairs were recorded. After game completion participants individually completed a knowledge test. For solitary players this ended the session. Collaborating pairs could discuss test answers (without receiving experimenter feedback) and give a final group answer. Collaboration was found not to affect game engagement and also did not affect individual knowledge test scores. The collaboration presumably did not advance the players' individual knowledge because the game dialogues mainly dealt with superficial game features such as move proposals. The collaborating players benefitted significantly from the opportunity to discuss test scores. The discussion revolves around game selection and game didactics (including scripted collaboration and debriefing) as routes for future studies to follow in ways of improving game utilisation in school. IntroductionComputer games are extremely popular nowadays. They can be so engaging that players may lose all sense of time and place; players often display a phenomenal fascination and concentration. Schools generally do not provide a similar experience. Many students lack engagement, finding it difficult to remain concentrated on school work for an extended period of time. Yair's (2000) study is illustrative. This research, involving 865 students from 33 elementary and secondary schools, indicated that students were alienated from classroom instructions for almost half their time.

Effects of scripting on dialogues, motivation and learning outcomes in serious games

“…A very large majority, 90.2%, of the dialogic acts in the control condition consisted of first‐ and second‐level verbalisations. This outcome is comparable to the score of 88% found for these verbalisations by van der Meij, Albers and Leemkuil (). Likewise, the proportions of third‐ and fourth‐level verbalisations in the control group were comparable across studies.…”

“…The dialogues were recorded, transcribed and coded in the same way as in the study by van der Meij, Albers and Leemkuil (2011). More specifically, we employed the same dialogue coding scheme 464 British Journal of Educational Technology Vol 51 No 2 2020 that was used in the aforementioned study (see Table 1).…”

How Debriefing Strategies Can Improve Student Motivation and Self-Efficacy in Game-Based Learning

“…It is an interesting result that most of the students emphasized the requirement of collaboration in debriefing sessions whether they were in the team debriefing group or not. Although Van der Meij et al (2011) and Van der Meij et al (2013) could not find any advantages of team debriefing, the discrepancy can be due to the game type (social game vs. individual game). Although the results showed the superiority of team debriefing, several learners preferred individual debriefing.…”

Empathic Robot for Group Learning

“…They have been around since at least the 1950s, and their applications in education are well-documented [De Gloria et al 2014] 1 . Collaborative serious games, in particular, combine the advantages of serious games with social learning, and some studies have suggested that they support learners in articulating the knowledge that would otherwise have remained intuitive [van der Meij et al 2011]. Although some researchers questioned the effectiveness of collaborative serious games, research in this area is still scarce and often ambiguous [Wouters et al 2013].…”