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Using Non-player Characters to Scaffold Non-gamer Students in Serious Gaming

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Learning, Design, and Technology

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Abstract

Curiosity is the best driving force for learning; keeping learners curious by engaging them via gaming has been regarded as a desirable approach to education. Virtual Interactive Student-Oriented Learning Environment (VISOLE) is a pedagogical approach to serious gaming that we have proposed. Based on the VISOLE pedagogy, we developed Farmtasia®, a multiplayer online serious game based on a thematic topic, Agriculture, in the Hong Kong senior secondary geography education curriculum. Drawing on the notion of virtual mentoring, we aim to further enhance the design of the game by introducing a number of non-player characters (NPCs) to scaffold non-gamer students’ learning in the gameplay process. This chapter reports a learning experiment in which we compared the pedagogical effectiveness of the revised version of the game with that of the original version, in terms of non-gamer students’ knowledge acquisition. The results show that the experimental group students (who learned with the revised) significantly outperformed the control group students (who learned with the original), with a considerable effect size.

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Acknowledgments

The work described in this chapter was substantially supported by a grant from the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong Special Administration Region, China (Project No.: 459013).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Curriculum and Instruction & Centre for Learning Sciences and Technologies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, N.T., Hong Kong

    Morris S. Y. Jong

  2. Learning Science Lab, Department of Educational Technology, Graduate School of Education, Peking University, Beijing, China

    Junjie Shang

  3. Department of Electrical & Electronic Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam Road, Room 707, Chow Yei Ching (CYC) Building, Pokfulam, Hong Kong

    Vincent W. L. Tam

Authors
  1. Morris S. Y. Jong
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  2. Junjie Shang
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  3. Vincent W. L. Tam
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Correspondence to Morris S. Y. Jong .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. College of Info, Ste G150, Univ of North Texas, Denton, Texas, USA

    Michael J Spector

  2. School of Education, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia, USA

    Barbara B Lockee

  3. School of Education, Baker University, Overland Park, Kansas, USA

    Marcus D. Childress

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Jong, M.S.Y., Shang, J., Tam, V.W.L. (2016). Using Non-player Characters to Scaffold Non-gamer Students in Serious Gaming. In: Spector, M., Lockee, B., Childress, M. (eds) Learning, Design, and Technology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17727-4_36-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17727-4_36-1

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-17727-4

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