Assessing implicit science learning in digital games

Learning analytics for enhancing the usability of serious games in formal education: A systematic literature review and research agenda

In recent years, the interest in the use of serious games as teaching and learning tools in traditional educational processes has increased significantly. Serious Educational Games (SEG) and Learning Analytics (LA) are gaining increasing attention from teachers and researchers, since they both can improve the learning quality. In this article, we aimed to examine, summarize and characterize the current state of the art related to the application of LA to SEGs through a systematic literature review based on a methodological instrument called PRISMA. A qualitative analysis was performed in which 80 significant papers were selected from the ScienceDirect, SpringerLink, Web of Science, and IEEE-Xplore databases. From this analysis, we identified the main features of an efficient use of SEGs in terms of success factors and learning outcomes; we also discussed the benefits and challenges of integrating LA approaches into these environments. Consequently, a new multidimensional taxonomy for using SEGs to categorize these major features was proposed. The findings of this review reveal that SEGs have a beneficial effect on students' behavior, cognition and emotion; but more future works and empirical studies investigating data science techniques are needed to improve the usability of educational games. This research and the suggested guideline recommendations may be of value to researchers and practitioners willing to deploy SEGs contributing thus to the continuous improvement of digital learning in formal education.

Impact of Pediatric Mobile Game Play on Healthy Eating Behavior: Randomized Controlled Trial

BACKGROUND

Video and mobile games have been shown to have a positive impact on behavior change in children. However, the potential impact of game play patterns on outcomes of interest are yet to be understood, especially for games with implicit learning components.

OBJECTIVE

This study investigates the immediate impact of fooya!, a pediatric dietary mobile game with implicit learning components, on food choices. It also quantifies children's heterogeneous game play patterns using game telemetry and determines the effects of these patterns on players' food choices.

METHODS

We analyzed data from a randomized controlled trial (RCT) involving 104 children, aged 10 to 11 years, randomly assigned to the treatment group (played fooya!, a dietary mobile game developed by one of the authors) or the control group (played Uno, a board game without dietary education). Children played the game for 20 minutes each in two sessions. After playing the game in each session, the children were asked to choose 2 out of 6 food items (3 healthy and 3 unhealthy choices). The number of healthy choices in both sessions was used as the major outcome. We first compared the choice and identification of healthy foods between treatment and control groups using statistical tests. Next, using game telemetry, we determined the variability in game play patterns by quantifying game play measures and modeled the process of game playing at any level across all students as a Markov chain. Finally, correlation tests and regression models were used to establish the relationship between game play measures and actual food choices.

RESULTS

We saw a significant main effect of the mobile game on number of healthy foods actually chosen (treatment 2.48, control 1.10; P<.001; Cohen d=1.25) and identified (treatment 7.3, control 6.94; P=.048; Cohen d=.25). A large variation was observed in children's game play patterns. Children played an average of 15 game levels in 2 sessions, with a range of 2 to 23 levels. The greatest variation was noted in the proportion of scoring activities that were highly rewarded, with an average of 0.17, ranging from 0.003 to 0.98. Healthy food choice was negatively associated with the number of unhealthy food facts that children read in the game (Kendall τ=-.32, P=.04), even after controlling for baseline food preference.

CONCLUSIONS

A mobile video game embedded with implicit learning components showed a strong positive impact on children's food choices immediately following the game. Game telemetry captured children's different play patterns and was associated with behavioral outcomes. These results have implications for the design and use of mobile games as an intervention to improve health behaviors, such as the display of unhealthy food facts during game play. Longitudinal RCTs are needed to assess long-term impact.

TRIAL REGISTRATION

ClinicalTrials.gov NCT04082195; https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04082195, registered retrospectively.