Piloting Two Educational Games in Five European Countries: Teachers' Perceptions of Student Motivation and Classroom Engagement

Abstract

The following article will present first results from a project that explored the application of two educational games in school classes. The project included 20 teachers from Italy, Portugal, Norway, Poland, and Greece. The learning games used in this pilot were Variant: Limits™, an educational mathematics game about calculus, and ARTé: Mecenas™, an educational art history game about the Italian Renaissance, both by Triseum™, an educational game studio based in the US. The scientific evaluation of the game-based learning pilot included focus groups and focused on aspects of application modes and effects on student motivation, classroom engagement, and learning outcomes. In the following, the focus group results for motivation and classroom engagement will be introduced, and first conclusions will be drawn regarding the respective effects on students as perceived by the teachers. The overall results show that both games were successful in stimulating motivation and classroom engagement with the students, even though the effects varied between the two games in certain regards and were discovered to depend on numerous factors in the context of interpersonal differences.