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This chapter introduces the topic of cooperation and co-innovation between the audiovisual media and education sectors. It first discusses the emergence of educational film approximately a hundred years go – together with a new institutional framework, industry media, rulebooks, etc. It then discusses the ways public service media have addressed educational programming over the decades, including developing complex cross-media strategies and educational content databases more recently. The second half of the chapter is dedicated to the emergence of educational digital games, with their own institutional setups, production cultures, and training programmes. The chapter points, however, to a relative lack of cooperation between commercial game producers and educational institutions to date.

Against the backdrop of digital gaming, this chapter presents a cutting-edge, immersive, online video simulation of events that follow the calendar of a year in a chronically low-performing middle school in the United States. The traditional approach to preparing educational leaders has been harshly criticized by those who have, at times, shared in sustaining the traditional approach. The time is right for innovation. The intention of this simulation is to engage potential educational leaders in the professional development of their leadership skills. These skills are designated in a range of standards-based documents generated by the individual states in the United States, as well as at the national level by the Educational Leadership Policy Standards: 2008 document issued by the Council of Chief State School Officers. A highly sophisticated back-end to this simulation gathers evidence of both engagement and learning. The online format empowers anytime/anywhere learning in a mistake-tolerant educational setting at minimal incremental cost.

Game-based learning or simulation-based learning – especially Serious Games – are notions of the contemporary discourse on digitalisation in the higher education sector in Germany. These methods offer a more vivid and motivating learning context and they help to improve important competencies for reaching work-related higher education goals. This explorative study focuses on experts’ experiences with digital and non-digital serious games and their contribution towards developing self, social and management competencies, in the Bundeswehr Command and Staff College in Hamburg (Germany). Whilst there are numerous opportunities for using serious games in higher education, their use creates barriers for addressing social, as well as leadership/management competencies. In the future, game-based learning – and more specifically, digital game-based learning – could challenge the relation between learning as hard work and learn for fun, and between explicit and goal-oriented learning and implicit, incidental and explorative learning.

Two different types of technology-enabled stories that can help expand the notion of narratives are discussed in this chapter. The narratives found in digital storytelling and video games offer new possibilities and advantages for language learners and instructors. They are multimodal, immersive, and authentic; they offer significant motivational benefits and allow for agentive, situated, and participatory learning. Both forms, DST and video games, exemplify new modes of relating meaningful narratives. Media creation and sharing as well as gaming are familiar domains for today's learners. Thus, if these authentic practices are part of the learner's everyday experiences, it makes sense to utilize their potential for educational purposes. As the review of some applications in this chapter indicates, there is an area of convergence that is of particular interest for language learning purposes and may lead us to contemplate a redefinition of these narrative forms. In addition to more traditional narratives, these new and emergent forms can and should be represented in language learning curricula.

The most valuable resource of the European Union (EU) is its youth. The EU’s future depends on young people’s ability to identify themselves as Europeans, that is, united by a shared European identity and a solid commitment to be active EU citizens. Young people want and need to know more about what it means to be an EU citizen. However, the younger generation needs better education as to what the EU is, what it represents and how their daily lives are positively influenced because of the EU. With the intention to bring EU topics closer to the daily lives of students, we developed an innovative, user-friendly educational game titled ‘Do we all speak the same language in Europe?’ to convey to the audience an essential message, that is, there are common roots that over centuries have shaped who we are. This chapter elaborates the rationale behind the educational game, outlines the rules of the game and discusses its value added by referencing the survey filled out by students who actually played the game. Conclusions and recommendations follow.

Purpose: This study explores how computer video games can promote creative techniques. It specialises in innovative elements of special educational video games: Virtual Recreation Based Mastering (VRBM), behavioural analytics and defined research results to measure the creative energy of leisure activities on laptops. The involvement and inclusion of gaming in learning are being adopted globally and becoming true global citizens. The macro problems and awareness, such as sustainability, climate changes, etc., around it can be easily created through the advent of PC games.

Design/Methodology/Approach: Examining job incentives, true tales, and inventive skill-related elements allow for measuring creative aspects. The Player’s Statistics for Pride (PSFP) survey technique employs a heuristic checklist in the world of sports games to look at the areas of participating sports that are important to a participant’s overall performance and to assess the participant’s knowledge. Energy, freedom and control, connections and presence contribute to player happiness. This examination evaluates how these sports affect participants’ knowledge and the impact of the teacher’s information on student learning. The study aimed to enhance the understanding of the inventive capacity of persons engaged in developing knowledge and abilities while playing video games.

Findings: The findings demonstrate that a region’s capacity for innovation propels it to a certain degree of overall success in the leisurely game of service activity mastery. Results on how video games broaden crucial research as a foundation for the research version of creative skills are anticipated (CPLN). CPLN openly discusses the link between research concepts and innovation. The results’ interpretation is crucial.

Serious games are computer games with a primary purpose of educating or training while also entertaining. Literature has established that serious games can enhance learning in the classroom and improve student engagement. However, few studies have analyzed the factors that inhibit the adoption of serious games. The current study extends research by analyzing inhibitors of serious game adoption in an introductory accounting course for MBA students. The accounting mobile challenge (AMC) is a mobile accounting trivia game which utilizes both competitive and collaborative features in gameplay. Results demonstrated that students who identified as collaborative engaged in a greater amount of gameplay while those who identified as competitive did not. Furthermore, independent learners, as well as those who utilized mobile technology more outside of class, more readily adopted the technology. Utilizing the Technology Acceptance Model (Davis, 1989) as a framework, it was predicted that the perceived value of the AMC would increase as students played the game more. Results support this prediction. Finally, a “discouragement effect” was detected as a major inhibitor to utilizing the technology as students who did poorly gave up and discontinued playing the game. This research contributes to the emerging literature on the inhibitors to serious game adoption in accounting.

The ability for learners to interact online via their avatars in a 3-D simulation space means that virtual worlds afford a host of educational opportunities not offered by other learning technology platforms, but their use also raises several pertinent issues that warrant consideration. This chapter reviews the educational use of virtual worlds from a design perspective. Virtual-world definitions are explored, along with their key educational characteristics. Different virtual-world environments are briefly contrasted, including Second Life, Active Worlds, Open Sim, and Minecraft. A wide variety of virtual-world uses in schools and universities are examined so as to understand their versatility. Key educational benefits of virtual worlds are distilled from the literature, such as the ability to facilitate 3-D simulations, role-plays, construction tasks, and immersive learning. Emergent issues surrounding the use of virtual worlds are also analyzed, including cognitive load, safety, and representational fidelity. One higher education and one school level vignette are provided in order to offer more detailed insight into the use of virtual worlds in practice. Recommendations for learning design and implementation are presented, based on the thematic analysis of contemporary virtual-worlds research.

Learning-via-gaming is an emerging area of interest and research within kindergarten to grade 12 (k-12), in US schools. As a vital part of the k-12 instructional mission, school libraries are exploring the potential role of videogames in mediating information-oriented skills development. Although the general concept of learning-via-gaming is not new to school libraries (e.g., library review card games), empirical knowledge of videogames’ representational landscapes is needed to assist school librarians in developing instructional programming. This study examined representations of information across three distinct genres of mainstream videogames (shooters, action-adventure, and role-playing). Specifically, qualitative content analysis was used to examine the types of inscribed, information resources that players could use to generate solutions during problem-solving events. Across the three video gaming genres studied, there were seven strata of information: socially constructed, interpersonal, environmental, process, resource, task, and symbolic stratums. The results of this study could assist school librarians in (1) designing instructional lessons around videogames and/or (2) guiding students through the process of transporting meanings from the domain of gaming to other domains (e.g., academic, community, and everyday information problem-solving).

This study provides empirical support for a link between video game play and likelihood to major in a STEM field.

Using the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), this study investigates whether adolescents who play video games are more likely than those who do not to choose a STEM field major in college, and if other characteristics explain this relationship.

Results from a nested series of logistic regression models show that – compared to those who do not play video games in adolescence – teens who play video games are 70% more likely to major in a STEM field when they attend college.

The Add Health dataset allows for empirical verification of the link between video game play and STEM major choice, but it is dated. Future research should use more recent data. Factors such as gaming platform and game genre are likely to be key variables in future research.

This finding lends support for including video game play as a potential factor in future studies on college major choice, and offers further empirical support for utilizing video games as a potential gateway into STEM.

Going beyond previous research, this study finds that playing commercial video games may be one entry point to STEM fields, and implies that it is important to understand the impact of games that millions of young people play.