Claudia Schrader

Educational games for brain health: revealing their unexplored potential through a neurocognitive approach

Educational games link the motivational nature of games with learning of knowledge and skills. Here, we go beyond effects on these learning outcomes. We review two lines of evidence which indicate the currently unexplored potential of educational games to promote brain health: First, gaming with specific neurocognitive demands (e.g., executive control), and second, educational learning experiences (e.g., studying foreign languages) improve brain health markers. These markers include cognitive ability, brain function, and brain structure. As educational games allow the combination of specific neurocognitive demands with educational learning experiences, they seem to be optimally suited for promoting brain health. We propose a neurocognitive approach to reveal this unexplored potential of educational games in future research.

Rising to the Challenge: An Emotion-Driven Approach Toward Adaptive Serious Games

Serious games are steadily becoming a powerful tool for educational purposes as their challenging characteristics are suggested to make them particularly appealing to learn with. This challenging nature, however, comes at a price, namely, the need to maintain the optimal balance according to players’ emotional experiences. By focusing on players’ emotions as main player characteristic considered to be important for learning processes and performance, this chapter surveys empirical research and current game development that contributes to an emotion-adaptive framework for games. The goal of this chapter is to clarify the importance of continuously adjusting game characteristics to players’ emotional states. As the interaction between game characteristics and players’ emotions highlights the need for continuously assessing at what point gameplay becomes more or less positively or negatively affected, methods for emotion recognition are presented. A summary of adaptable game design elements as well as implementation methods for adaptivity are provided.

Mobile Augmented Reality as an Orientation Aid: A Scavenger Hunt Prototype

Orientation in public environments is a critical skill for new arrivals, yet also one that is usually only learned gradually through trial and error. This paper suggests the use of pervasive augmented reality (AR) for the design of a serious game that teaches navigational skills in a public environment. Many AR scavenger hunt games confront players with new environments by default, however they rarely focus explicitly on teaching navigational skills. We propose a concept that utilises augmented reality techniques for increased immersion and motivation, while upholding the real-world sense of presence for an easy transfer of orientation skills to everyday life. For this purpose, we implemented a first prototypical serious game in the form of an AR scavenger hunt. A preliminary evaluation regarding its usability produced promising results. As such, the prototype constitutes a first proof of concept. In future iterations, it will be further developed as an adaptive AR serious game, and evaluated in respect to its efficacy in teaching orientation and navigation skills.

LiverDefense: how to employ a tower defense game as a customisable research tool

In game-related research, it is often necessary to create different versions of a game prototype and gather information about players. To make this possible even for non-programmers, we present LiverDefense, an educational Tower Defense game about the basic functions of the human liver, which can be used as a customisable research tool. LiverDefense can be customised via human-readable XML files both in its degree of difficulty and the content of Likert scale questionnaires to be presented to the player. As a proof of concept, LiverDefense has been successfully employed in a psychological study focused on exploring the effect of perceived control over gameplay on players’ emotions. We report on the analysis of this study with regard to enjoyment and frustration and the resulting insights on using LiverDefense as a customisable research tool.

LiverDefense: An Educational Tower Defense Game as an Evaluation Platform

This paper presents LiverDefense, an educational tower defense game illustrating the basic functions of the human liver. LiverDefense can be adapted with regard to its degree of difficulty via XML input files. Thus, researchers without programming skills can customize the game easily according to their needs. As such, it was tested in a user study to explore the effect of perceived control settings on players’ affective states, and learning outcomes.