On effective integration of educational content in serious games: text vs. game mechanics

As serious games are emerging as a new educational paradigm, it is increasingly important to understand how to integrate educational content into the games, and what elements of the game make learning more effective. This research proposes to add to the work in the area by examining whether learning objectives delivered through the game narratives as text, or learning objectives delivered through game mechanics provide a more effective way of integrating educational content in a game. In order to investigate this question, we designed a study to evaluate two types of participants that were divided into two groups to take part in complementary versions of the game. Participants are asked to play a game in which learning objectives are delivered either through text or game mechanics. An evaluation was performed with 60 participants. The results show that for one of the learning objectives, the participants learn more when the educational content was integrated through the game mechanics and that the difference between the group that learns through text and the one that learned through the game mechanics is statistically significant. For the rest of the learning objectives covered, no statistically significant difference was obtained between the two ways of integrating the learning objectives.