Abstract
Educational simulations and serious games hold great potential for creating engaging and productive learning environments in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) domains. In this paper, we present and reflect on some of our research findings from a series of studies on a computer simulation in the domain of electricity. These studies used the same simulation with varying instructional designs and over a range of grades. Interestingly, each design had a unique influence on either student performance or student engagement, or both. We hope our results can provide insight for designers producing simulations (or, serious games) for education and for educators utilizing these designs in practical settings.
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Notes
- 1.
According to Larkin and Simon (1987), the informational effectiveness of a representation is determined by how much information it contains, whereas the computational effectiveness of a representation is determined by how easily relevant information can be extracted and applied from it.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by grants no 116393 and 252580 from the Academy of Finland to the first author and grant no 266189 from the Academy of Finland to the second author.
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Veermans, K., Jaakkola, T. (2019). Pedagogy in Educational Simulations and Games. In: Cai, Y., van Joolingen, W., Walker, Z. (eds) VR, Simulations and Serious Games for Education. Gaming Media and Social Effects. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-2844-2_2
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