Digital games, cognitive skills, and motivation:

Connecting Learning Goals and Component Cognitive Skills in Digital Games

Growing bodies of research have investigated how digital games might be used as pedagogical tools and separately, how playing commercial games influences basic cognitive capacities or skills. The goal of the present research is to draw from these separate lines of research to ask how changes in basic cognitive capacities and formal learning gains may be related. The present study employed a gam...

Motivation, Engagement and Learning through Digital Games

Digital games can be powerful learning environments because they encourage active learning and participation within “affinity groups” (Gee, 2004). However, the use of games in formal educational environments is not always successful (O’Neil et al., 2005). There is a need to update existing theories of motivation and engagement in order to take recent game-related developments into account. Unde...

Digital games: motivation, engagement and informal learning

Can video games affect children’s cognitive and non-cognitive skills?∗

The aim of this paper is to investigate whether there is a causal relationship between video game playing and children’s cognitive and non-cognitive skills. According to the literature, video games have a potential to improve children’s cognitive abilities. Video games may also positively affect such non-cognitive skills as the ability to sustain attention and pro-social behavior. On the other ...

Digital games in medical education:Key terms, concepts, and definitions

Background: Game-based education is fast becoming a key instrument in medical education. Method: In this study, papers related to games were filtered and limited to full-text peer-reviewed published in English. Results: To the best of researchers’ knowledge, the concepts used in the literature are varied and distinct, and the literature is not conclusive on the definition of educational...