Gamification, the use of game design elements within nongame contexts, can be found across a wide range of digital products and is used to increase user engagement and simplify complex tasks for the user. While the use of gamification can be problematic with some content and contexts, these same strategies do have potential for engaging students…

Authors Kevin McCaughey and Rick Rosenberg demonstrate techniques for using board games to stimulate student-centered language practice that is flexible, productive, engaging, and fun. The article includes tips for efficient game play and for using games with a variety of levels and class sizes. The authors show that playing board games for…

Jason Taylor aims in this article to establish two related claims: first, that the features of games provide fertile grounds on which long term philosophical engagement can be fostered; and second, that the attitude of playfulness is a happy bedfellow for the attitude and dispositions that dialogical inquiry is designed to foster in both…

Purpose: This paper aims to explore the characteristics of playful literacies in case study research examining digital games in secondary English classrooms. It analyzes how educators use play as a resource for meaning-making and the impacts of play on student learning. Design/methodology/approach: The authors used a keyword search in relevant…

Playful practices have been linked to increased motivation, engagement, learning and skill development. However, limited research has explored what playful music learning might look like for primary schools, and how teachers might incorporate a range of playful music practices within their classrooms. Our conceptual model for playful music…

The article describes projects that combined experiential learning and gamification with teachers and pupils in junior high school science classes. The pupils planned and designed projects and critiqued the quality of the final products. A field report study model was employed using principles from the world of play in order to better understand…

A distinctive feature of game-based learning environments is their capacity to create learning experiences that are both effective and engaging. Recent advances in sensor-based technologies such as facial expression analysis and gaze tracking have introduced the opportunity to leverage multimodal data streams for learning analytics. Learning…

This study examines the design and enactment of a secondary physics unit on electromagnetism. The unit used an educational videogame to support peer dialogic engagement in a Singapore secondary school by engaging learners with qualitative physics phenomena. As an example of game-based learning, the unit includes activities and resources that…

Since 2012, the Prudence Foundation has been working to address the gap in financial literacy in developing nations by creating and distributing financial literacy media and curricula targeting 7- to 10-year-olds in Asia and, more recently, Africa. "Cha-Ching!" is a multipronged learning initiative that reaches children, teachers, and…

This report shares findings from EDC's evaluation study of "Cha-Ching Money Adventures." "Cha-Ching" is an interactive learning game that introduces 7- to 10-year-olds to fundamental financial concepts and fosters family dialogue about financial decisions. The authors found that the game was engaging for eight- and…

This paper introduces the results of applying a gameful approach based on six playful activities as a tool to improve the learning process in higher education. A total of 850 students from different courses of Universitat Rovira i Virgili (Spain) were involved in the study. The strategy was evaluated through a participant observation (active and…

Game-based learning (GBL) has increasingly been used to promote students' learning engagement. Although prior GBL studies have highlighted the significance of learning engagement as a mediator of students' meaningful learning, the existing accounts failed to capture specific evidence of how exactly students' in-game actions in GBL enhance learning…

Higher education faculty strive to adopt pedagogical approaches that generate student engagement, motivation, and quality learning experiences. The literature on play has much to offer higher education. However, playful pedagogy remains an uncommon approach in education and is often represented in the literature as a practice utilized for a…

Research examining teachers' decision making is abundant for pedagogical activities, yet a neglected area is the study of factors influencing teachers when selecting mathematical games. This article sheds light on the factors considered when teachers' select a specific game to use in their primary mathematics classroom. Data from 248 Australian…

Serious games are used in the field of cultural heritage as a means to transmit cultural knowledge and enable an experiential contact with cultural content. The authors' aim is to investigate whether a game design exploiting the less used combination of complex storytelling, endogenous cooperation, and competition has the potential to sufficiently…