Intelligent Behaviors of Virtual Characters in Serious Games for Child Safety Education

With the continued application of gaming for training and education, which has seen exponential growth over the past two decades, this book offers an insightful introduction to the current developments and applications of game technologies within educational settings, with cutting-edge academic research and industry insights, providing a greater understanding into current and future developments and advances within this field. Following on from the success of the first volume in 2011, researchers from around the world presents up-to-date research on a broad range of new and emerging topics such as serious games and emotion, games for music education and games for medical training, to gamification, bespoke serious games, and adaptation of commercial off-the shelf games for education and narrative design, giving readers a thorough understanding of the advances and current issues facing developers and designers regarding games for training and education. This second volume of Serious Games and Edutainment Applications offers further insights for researchers, designers and educators who are interested in using serious games for training and educational purposes, and gives game developers with detailed information on current topics and developments within this growing area

Game-Based Learning, Gamification in Education and Serious Games

The aim of this book is to present and discuss new advances in serious games to show how they could enhance the effectiveness and outreach of education, advertising, social awareness, health, policies, etc. We present their use in structured learning activities, not only with a focus on game-based learning, but also on the use of game elements and game design techniques to gamify the learning process. The published contributions really demonstrate the wide scope of application of game-based approaches in terms of purpose, target groups, technologies and domains and one aspect they have in common is that they provide evidence of how effective serious games, game-based learning and gamification can be

Scaffolding Early Engineers\u27 Design Learning with a Videogame: Investigating the Influence of Minecraft as a Platform for Design Ideation

In this manuscript a modified commercial game, Minecraft, was used to assist early engineering students\u27 learning the design process. More specifically, a designed-based research approach was employed utilizing a concurrent mixed methods to investigate the use of Minecraft for learning about the concept generation stage of design. Survey instruments measuring understanding of the design process, in-depth interviews on students’ interactions with the platform and iterations of students’ virtual artifacts were captured for analysis. Although no learning gains were detected from pre to post instrument, several analytical methods including visual content analysis of students’ artifacts, discourse analysis of students’ framing of the platform and thematic analysis of their reported formal and informal use of the game provided some evidence of students\u27 engagement with the game, the mechanisms of that engagement, an array of ways in which students may use the platform informally that related to class-work, and the promise of virtual worlds for design learning