Social Health Education Programs at School: Investigating the Integration of Serious Games in the Curriculum

• Autores: Katarina Panic, Verolien Cauberghe, Patrick De Pelsmacker
• Localización: Media and Education in the Digital Age. Concepts, Assessments, Subversions / Matteo Stocchetti (ed. lit.), 2014, ISBN 978-3-631-65154-4, págs. 167-182
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • To date, studies conducted on the effectiveness of games as learning tools often show mixed results, making it difficult to generalize about their overall impact on learning. Therefore, this study investigates the relationship between technology and education, more specifically the potential of educational games as a tool to enhance the effectiveness of traditional health education programs in school. First, we investigate whether including a serious game into a traditional school health education program can potentially increase the effectiveness of this program, increasing children’s awareness of the health issue and improving their behavior. Second, we consider how these games should be integrated into health education programs to maximize their potential. We investigate the impact of two integration strategies (a game as pre-instructional versus post-instructional strategy) to maximize the learning (and persuasive) process of the health education program. The results show that integrating a serious game into a traditional classroom lesson appears to be an effective tool to increase children’s classroom attention, although it does not directly lead to behaviour change. Second, the results reveal that games are better played before the lesson than afterwards. In sum, this study shows that digital games can provide an additional value to the educational program but in domains like health education where actual behavioural changes are pursued, the transfer from game to behaviour change is neither automatic nor guaranteed.