CHAPTER II

Related Literature and Studies

Educational games have emerged as a dynamic tool in modern pedagogy, offering a unique and engaging
approach to learning across various academic disciplines. This explores the multifaceted impact of
educational games on student learning, considering their influence on cognitive development, academic
performance, and socio-emotional skills.

Game Based Engagement Benefits

Over the past two decades game-based learning has grown increasingly into a popular instructional
approach due to its power to motivate and engage students in complex learning, such as problem
solving, decision making, and metacognitive thinking. There has been a lot of effort to design and
develop educational digital games or to use existing commercial entertaining games to create a game-
based learning environment. Despite some ongoing debates over positive or negative impact of digital
games, there is sufficient empirical evidence to support the benefits of digital games (including video
and computer games) for learners in several aspects, such as cognitive aspect, motivational aspect,
emotional aspect, and social aspect. Researchers studying the impact of games, including the impact of
massive multiple player online games (MMOG), have observed that if designed well, games could afford
rich opportunities for, communication, collaboration, fantasy engagement, problem solving, hypothesis
generation, identity development, and reflective thinking. Games also help to understand complex
systems, create expressions with digital tools, and enhance social interactions (Oksanen & Hämäläinen,
2014; Squire, 2008). Why are digital games becoming one of the popular instructional tools? The answer
is simple: Games are fun and engaging. Since games have such capability and power to motivate and
benefit leaners’ cognitive thinking, educational researchers have attempted to capture the fun,
challenges and engagement of game playing experience and apply it to support learning and instruction.

Online Game Addiction

Chou et al. examined the possible predictors of internet use of Turkish adolescents. They found that
female students used internet mostly for communication but male students used mostly for playing
online games and reading newspapers and magazines also studied the key factors of the internet
addiction. These factors were reported as “time spent on the internet,” “internet use”, “identified
problems” gender differences, psychosocial variables and computer attitudes. In this study it was found
that men had more the internet addiction than women. Especially, found that men were more likely
pathological users than females (cited in, Chou et. al., 2005). Also in this study statistically meaningful
difference was found between male and female users and online game addiction. The results also
showed that men used online games more than women. On the other hand negative correlation was
found between the daily duration of playing online games and online game addiction. Especially the fact
of duration of daily online playing games was exactly inversely related to troubles faced by the students.
This result shows that the students may not accept disruptions or ignore the experienced troubles. At
the same time negative relations were found between online gaming with the satisfying feelings of
success, achieve economic gains and online game addiction.

Effectiveness of Educational Games

A systematic literature review had been conducted by Calderón and Ruiz (2015) who found that 53
educational games research literature had adopted different methods to assess the effectiveness of
diverse educational games in the period between November 2013 and April 2015, compared to 18 and
20 games used in health and wellness, and the professional learning and training domain, respectively.
They also reported that 60% of these 53 studies examined the effectiveness of using educational games
in higher education setting, compared to only 40% in primary or secondary school settings, indicating
that teachers in higher education are more likely to combine educational games with traditional teaching
methods into students’ learning experiences a sign of creativity of embracing the new strategy to enrich
students’ learning experience.

Introduction of Educational Game: “PaGamO”

“PaGamO” is an online gamification learning platform for individuals to learn and compete with each
other by participating in a game. Individuals are required to answer questions correctly in the game to
successfully build, occupy and conquer territories. It is believed that with such a popular and unique
method of motivating students to learn, students would be more motivated and entertained in the
learning process. In addition, “PaGamO” provides information for teachers to monitor the learning
progress of a large group of students, as shown in the statistics of completion rate and percentage-
correctness rates (Minovic et al., 2012b).

References:

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/feduc.2021.623793/full

https://educationaltechnologyjournal.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s41239-017-0062-1