Traditional pattern teaching is an essential part of cultivating artistic quality, which is confronted with cognitive and motivational problems of teenagers. As a teaching strategy, schema theory attaches importance to the students' knowledge construction, which can reduce the cognitive difficulties caused by the increase of knowledge difficulty. This theory is often used in traditional teaching methods. Serious game is a new carrier that has emerged in recent years, it pays attention to experience and immersion, promising to improve artistic learning and motivation. Therefore, this research attempts to extract the characteristics of schema theory to guide serious game design to learning traditional patterns. The specific objective was to investigate how schema and game were connected and explore the impact of games compared with multimedia courseware on students' performance, motivation and cognitive load. The study involved two groups of students who used serious games and multimedia courseware in the same experimental environment. The results indicated that schema can be better integrated into the game, and the game also accelerated schema construction. Moreover, the game has advantages in acquiring and retaining knowledge, optimizing intrinsic motivation and cognitive load.