Entering Aladdin’s cave: developing an app for children with Down Syndrome

Tablets have much to offer children with learning difficulties but evidence of their effectiveness to teach academic skills is limited and cannot be easily separated from the quality of the software. This paper analyses data from three iterative cycles of designing an App for children with Down syndrome to support their awareness of quantity through an inclusive game. Research with neurotypical children suggests that representation of quantity (or magnitude) is an area with considerable potential in supporting the foundations for children’s mathematical learning. It has received little attention as an aspect for intervention for children with Down syndrome. Data collected in this study illustrate the need to carefully align the game mechanic to the target skills, strengthen levels of access and introduce gradations of attentional demand. They also signal the interrelationship between children’s cognitive and affective responses to the game, making it essential to find the optimal level of challenge. Children’s strategies in response to mistakes indicate the importance of creating an agile responsive system. The data also suggest that developers routinely extend the number of features that are optional, enabling a greater level of personalization and a more inclusive game

Serious support for serious gaming

This dissertation focused on evaluating game-based learning in prevocational education. Though many researchers seem convinced of the potential of game-based learning, researchers also acknowledge that the empirical evidence for games as learning tools is ambiguous. Comparison between studies is difficult due to diversity in content, gameplay, and population (among other things). To distinguish between effective and ineffective practices and elements, and to optimize game-based learning, value-added comparison studies are required. Therefore, studies in the current dissertation adopted a value-added approach: a standard version of the game (i.e., an educational math game ‘Zeldenrust’) was compared to versions that were enhanced with different forms of instructional support (i.e., self-explanation prompts, collaboration, and faded worked examples). Three consecutive empirical studies investigated the effect of these forms of instructional support on the in-game performance and knowledge acquisition of prevocational students. It is important to highlight the outcome that learning was significantly enhanced in all three studies. The overall pretest to posttest Cohen’s d effect sizes for studies 1, 2, and 3 were 0.44, 0.46, and 0.46 respectively, which are regarded as medium-sized effects. These findings show that the intervention involving the educational game ‘Zeldenrust’ formed a solid foundation for learning about the domain of proportional reasoning. The results of the three studies show that further improvement of this environment was difficult, but possible. The investigated implementations of self-explanation prompts and collaboration did not result in improved effectiveness, but the addition of faded worked examples did. This seems to suggest that prevocational students benefit from continuous support that contains expert advice. Though game designers show a tendency to hide the instructional component and educational content in educational games, results of the current line of study suggest that a formal representation of the educational content in the game-environment could support students gameplay and learning

Self-Explanations in Game-Based Learning: From Tacit to Transferable Knowledge

Game-based learning is often considered to be an effective instructional approach, but the effects of game-based learning are varied and far from optimal. Aside from many features and characteristics that might affect the results of game-based learning, we conjecture that games generally thrive on experiential learning and that experiential learning does increase knowledge, but that this knowledge is often implicit. We note that though implicit knowledge is certainly valuable, that in general explicit knowledge is considered more desirable in education, because it is more accessible and promotes transfer. It is suggested that explicit knowledge does not always automatically follow from the development of implicit knowledge, but that this process can be supported through self-explanations. Because self-explanations rarely occur automatically in game-based learning environments, we propose that self-explanations in game-based learning environments can be elicited by specific instructional approaches. Three possible approaches for eliciting self-explanations are discussed: question prompts, collaboration, and partial worked examples