Learning in serious virtual worlds: Evaluation of learning effectiveness and appeal to students in the E-Junior project

By Maja Wrzesien, Mariano Alcañiz Raya. Comput. Educ., 2010

304 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The objective of this study is to present and to evaluate the E-Junior application: a serious virtual world (SVW) for teaching children natural science and ecology. E-Junior was designed according to pedagogical theories and curricular objectives to help children learn about the Mediterranean Sea and its environmental issues while playing. In this study, we present data about the E-Junior evaluation. A class in a serious virtual world (virtual group) was compared with a traditional type of class (traditional group) that contained identical learning objectives and contents but lacked a gaming aspect. Data collection consisted of quantitative and qualitative measures on a sample of 48 children. With regards to learning effectiveness, the results showed that the serious virtual world does not present statistically significant differences with the traditional type of class. However, students from the virtual group reported enjoying the class more, being more engaged, and having greater intentions to participate than students from the traditional group. The plausible explanation for this can be found in the qualitative data. The implications of these results and improvement proposals are also discussed in this work.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Social Psychology, Human-Computer Interaction

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/095b1e4806a1355680a5c4d9c9b4c792194859c7

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In Developmental and Educational Psychology

In Social Psychology

In Human-Computer Interaction

Citations in the corpus

Gameplay Engagement and Learning in Game-Based Learning (2015, background): “However, many players were not engaged by the explanations provided by the characters (Wrzesien & Raya, 2010), and several had difficulties moving within the virtual environment (Virvou & Katsionis, 2008).”
Game-Based Learning in Science Education: A Review of Relevant Research (2013, methodology): “…collaboration mode was often adopted by researchers, who either arranged students to play games in pairs on a computer (e.g., Anderson and Barnett 2011; Annetta et al. 2009) or put them in the same physical game context (e.g., Price et al. 2003; Sa´nchez and Olivares 2011; Wrzesien and Raya 2010).”