An online game approach for improving students' learning performance in web-based problem-solving activities

  • Authors:

  • Gwo-Jen Hwang;Po-Han Wu;Chi-Chang Chen

  • Affiliations:

  • Graduate Institute of Digital Learning and Education, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, 43, Sec. 4, Keelung Rd., Taipei 106, Taiwan;Department of Engineering Science, National Cheng Kung University, No. 1, University Rd., Tainan City 701, Taiwan;Department of Information and Learning Technology, National University of Tainan, No. 33, Sec. 2, Shulin St., Tainan City 70005, Taiwan

  • Venue:
  • Computers & Education
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

In this paper, an online game was developed in the form of a competitive board game for conducting web-based problem-solving activities. The participants of the game determined their move by throwing a dice. Each location of the game board corresponds to a gaming task, which could be a web-based information-searching question or a mini-game; the former was used to guide the participants to search for information to answer a series of questions related to the target learning issue, while the latter was used to provide supplementary materials during the gaming process. To evaluate the performance of the proposed approach, an experiment was conducted on an elementary school natural science course. The experimental results showed that the proposed approach not only significantly promoted the flow experience, learning attitudes, learning interest and technology acceptance degree of the students, but also improved their learning achievements in the web-based problem-solving activity.