Abstract
According to McGonagall (Reality is broken, why games make us better and how they can change the world. Penguin Press, 400 p, 2010), the average child in a country with a strong gamer culture will have spent 10,000 h playing online games by the age of 21, which is about the same amount of time spent in school. This gaming time is so huge that one can certainly ask if video games have a role to play in education. This research studies the impact of Mecanika, an educational video game about the principles of Newtonian mechanics. A total sample of 185 high school students was selected for the current study. Experimental group (N = 94) received the treatment through Mecanika, whereas the control group (N = 91) was selected to receive conventional instruction. Further, the students of control group played at Mecanika without any teacher assistance or instructions. The analysis of pretest and posttest scores of Force Concept Inventory (Hestenes et al., Phys Teacher 30:141–158, 1992) between both groups indicated that the experimental group’s students significantly outperformed the control group. On average, students of experimental group obtained a higher normalized gain (M = .10, SD = .02) than students of control group (M = .02, SD = .02). An independent samples t test indicated that the difference was significant t(183) = 3.81, p < .001 and of medium size effect (d = 0.6). The results from this first part of the experimentation reveal that Mecanika may be an effective way to improve conceptual change for Newtonian mechanics. In the second part of the experimentation, students of control group played at Mecanika but, unlike other group, didn’t benefit of any assistance. On average, students that have been playing at Mecanika by themselves obtained a comparable gain (M = .08, SD = .02) than students who received the support of their teacher and of the guidebooks (M = .10, SD = .02) in part one of the experimentation. The results showed that difference was not significant and did represent a negligible effect. It seems that most of the game’s potential to generate conceptual change comes with playing and not really with the integration in the verbal or written explanations in teacher’s setting. Encouragingly, it can be proposed that this genre of learning games may prove suitable for engaging students by themselves in active exploration of core science concepts. The Mecanika game is available freely at http://Mecanika.ca.
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Acknowledgments
The authors gratefully acknowledge the collaboration of the CREO company (http://www.creo.ca), and the financial support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), the Fonds de Recherche du Québec – Société et Culture (FQRSC), and the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI).
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Riopel, M., Potvin, P., Boucher-Genesse, F., Allaire-Duquette, G. (2016). Impact of Educational Video Game on Students’ Conceptions Related to Newtonian Mechanics. In: Riopel, M., Smyrnaiou, Z. (eds) New Developments in Science and Technology Education. Innovations in Science Education and Technology, vol 23. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22933-1_13
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