The Role of Surprise in Game-Based Learning for Mathematics

Abstract

In this paper we investigate the potential of surprise on learning with prevocational students in the domain of proportional reasoning. Surprise involves an emotional reaction, but it also serves a cognitive goal as it directs attention to explain why the surprising event occurred and to learn for the future. Experiment 1 -comparing a surprise condition with a control condition -found no differences, but the results suggested that surprise may be beneficial for higher level students. In Experiment 2 we combined Expectancy strength (Strong vs. Weak) with Surprise (Present vs. Absent) using higher level students. We found a marginal effect of surprise on learning indicating that students who experienced surprises learned more than students who were not exposed to these surprises but we found a stronger positive effect of surprise when we included existing proportional reasoning skill as factor. These results provide evidence that narrative techniques such as surprise can be used for the purpose of learning.

A Serious Game to Inform Young Citizens on Canal Water Maintenance

“…The player now stays engaged with the game and gets constantly challenged with an increasing navigation and spawn speeds. This goes hand-in-hand with the theory of Wouters et al [11]: surprises have a positive effect on learning when existing proportional reasoning is included. Players who reached this phase should have a basic understanding of whether an item should be removed.…”

Narration-Based Techniques to Facilitate Game-Based Learning

“…We did fi nd in this second study a signifi cant positive effect of surprise on the posttest of reasoning skill when we included preexisting proportional reasoning skill as factor (Wouters et al 2015a(Wouters et al , 2015b.…”

“…The results of a fi rst study with Zeldenrust showed that playing the game had a learning effect, that is, in both conditions there were signifi cant gains in proportional reasoning skill; however, the curiosity condition did not advance more in proportional reasoning skill than the control group (Wouters et al, 2015a(Wouters et al, , 2015b. In a second study with improvements on instruction and interface design, game play did not yield learning, though in both studies performance on the game assignments contributed strongly to offl ine posttest performance (based upon multiple linear regression analyses).…”

Supporting Proportional Reasoning Through Technology Integration in Mathematics Learning

“…Various types of technology have been used to facilitate the development of students' proportional reasoning skills. The majority of researchers used the "Zeldenrust" tool with a total of 6 documents (Vrugte et al, 2015(Vrugte et al, , 2017Wouters et al, 2016Wouters et al, , 2017. Zeldenrust is a 2D game tool developed by utilising the Flash/ActionScript 3 program, which is a popular medium for developing interactive media (Paat et al, 2019).…”