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The purpose of this study was to analyze the state of mobile game-based learning in the field of cultural heritage education.

A bibliometric methodology based on scientific mapping and an analysis of co-words was used. The scientific production on this field of study indexed in Scopus was analyzed. The analysis included a total of 725 publications.

The results show that the National Research Council of Italy is the institution with the highest volume of production. Among the journals, the Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage stands out. In addition, in the analysis of the structural and thematic development of co-words, a low percentage of keyword matching was observed. The research is currently mainly oriented to pedagogical methods, especially game-based learning, gamification and the use of serious games, although these are not the only trends in this field. Research is also focusing on virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality.

This work is an exploratory and novel study that analyzes the publications to date on mobile game-based learning in cultural heritage education. In theoretical terms, this can serve as support so that other researchers interested in this field can access the information highlighted in this work. From a practical perspective, this work will contribute to the promotion of new innovative actions in cultural heritage education to satisfy the demands of a learning group increasingly familiar with games technology.

A makerspace has recently been identified as an essential learning field for cultivating students’ creative and thinking abilities. Creating a makerspace service within a university library is vital, as it fosters innovation, interdisciplinary learning, practical skills, entrepreneurship and career readiness while transforming the library into a dynamic centre for hands-on education and collaboration. Nevertheless, the wide-ranging functions and uses of makerspace equipment can potentially lead to a situation where librarians are overwhelmed by their duties due to manpower constraints. Therefore, this study aims to develop a novel game-based augmented reality navigation system (GARNS) based on the Octalysis gamification framework and scaffolding theory to support makerspace user education, hoping to promote learners’ learning motivation and their immersive experience and to enhance the learning performance of makerspace user education.

With a true experimental research method, 24 grade 11 students from a high school in Keelung City, Taiwan, were recruited to participate in the experiment on makerspace user education. Among them, ten students were randomly assigned to the experimental group using the GARNS and the other seven students were randomly assigned to a control group using the Web navigation system. The remaining seven students were assigned to a second control group using the narrative guided tour with a librarian to conduct makerspace user education.

Analytical results show that learners can achieve significant learning effectiveness using the GARNS, Web navigation system or traditional narrative guided tour with a librarian for makerspace user education. There were no significant differences in learning effectiveness and motivation neither between the GARNS group and the narrative guided tour with a librarian group nor between the Web navigation system group and the narrative guided tour with a librarian group. However, there were significant differences in learning effectiveness and motivation in terms of the value and expectation dimensions of learning motivation between the GARNS group and the Web navigation system group, and the GARNS group was significantly better than the Web navigation system group.

The study’s practical implication on makerspace user education is to reduce the manpower of a university library with makerspace services by the proposed GARNS that can offer a practical solution to enhance the learning effectiveness and motivation of makerspace through immersive game-based autonomous learning. Additionally, the study’s theoretical contribution lies in its innovative combination of game-based learning and scaffolding theory, while its practical significance stems from its potential to revolutionize makerspace user education, enhance motivation and performance and influence the broader landscape of educational technology.

This study combines game-based learning with augmented reality tools to develop a novel GARNS, which provides an innovative and effective learning tool suitable for the characteristics of makerspace and contributes to promoting makerspace user education and diversified learning modes. Additionally, most interviewees believed that using GARNS for educating makerspace users could assist them in consistently evaluating, choosing and discovering educational tasks in a library makerspace. This study contributes to promoting the popularization of makerspace user education.

This paper aims to address opportunities and tensions when creating game-based learning practices in higher education. By detailing examples from a university in the Southeastern USA and the communities it serves, we suggest game-based research and learning be approached as a unifying influence adaptable across contexts.

We use a working example methodology where someone with expertise “works through” a well-known issue while making the thinking overt. In this manner, we reveal processes, successes and challenges infusing game-based learning in higher education to deepen understanding between fields and encourage research and practice with games across disciplines.

The working example demonstrates that games served as a unifying influence in three primary ways, which included redesigning courses and implementing programmatic changes; using existing programs to promote interdisciplinary teaching and research; and increasing outreach and partnerships. In each example, games served to strengthen or support the initiatives.

This paper extends literature on the value of games to promote research and learning. Significantly, it provides an example for others in game-based learning fields to consider when building similar programs in higher education.

Entrepreneurship educators have recently employed various computer- and game-based teaching methods to develop students’ entrepreneurship knowledge and competencies. However, our understanding of the learning outcomes (LOs) of such methods for students and specifically gamification teaching techniques is fragmented and underdeveloped. This chapter aimed to narrow the gap by systematically analyzing the peer-reviewed empirical studies on gamification and students’ entrepreneurship LOs (ELOs).

This study employed the systematic literature review method to examine the papers on the intersection between gamification and entrepreneurship education (EE). Some of 80 papers were retrieved from Google Scholar, Web of Science and Scopus databases and 16 papers were included in the final analysis. The papers were analyzed based on the key LOs that teaching entrepreneurship using gamification have for students.

This study found limited literature on the interrelationship between gamification and students’ ELOs. The majority of these studies suggested a positive association between gamification and students’ ELOs. These ELOs were classified into four key groups including cognitive, behavioral, social/interpersonal and skill-based LOs. This analysis explored the huge gap in empirical studies on the impact of gamification on students’ ELOs.

This exploratory study is limited to the systematic review of the empirical researches published in scientific journals. Of the numerous game-based and simulation teaching methods, this systematic analysis focused on gamification and its effects on cultivating entrepreneurial knowledge and competencies in students. Future studies should include published and unpublished papers in other sources (such as books, book chapters, working papers and theses) and other types of technology-based entrepreneurship teaching methods.

Educators and computer-based game designers may use the findings of this study to improve the effectiveness of gamified EE and training programs by connecting the objectives and content of the programs to students’ ELOs and examining if the programs create the intended ELOs in students.

This chapter is one of the first attempts that examines students’ LOs of gamification in EE. This chapter contributes to the limited validated knowledge and understanding of the impact of gamification on ELOs of students.

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.

The purpose of this study is to examine the use of game-based learning for approximations of practice within a critical, project-based (CPB) clinical experience for preservice teachers (PSTs). Within the clinical experience, secondary English Language Arts PSTs practiced modeling argumentative thinking through playing a board game, Race to the White House, with ninth-grade students.

Data collection took place at a public high school in the mid-Atlantic region of the USA. A variety of data was collected including written reflections by PSTs about their experiences leading the game play, audio recordings of the small group game play and a transcript of a whole-class 30-min post-game discussion with the PSTs and classroom teacher. To analyze the data, patterns of discourse were identified.

The game-based learning activity provided an accessible structure for PSTs to model their own argumentative thinking, presented opportunities for PSTs to elicit and interpret students’ thinking to support students’ practice in constructing an argument and created a playful context for PSTs to encourage students to produce arguments and critique the argumentation work of others.

Game-based learning within CPB clinical experiences has the potential to bring students, PSTs, inservice teachers and teacher educators together to experiment with how to help PSTs practice engaging with students in different ways than a traditional teacher-to-student dynamic.

Game design and game play within CPB clinical experiences has the potential to bring students, PSTs, inservice teachers and teacher educators together to experiment with how to make teaching and learning a more social and collaborative process.

This paper aims to provide a framework for understanding and differentiating among different forms of game-based teaching and learning (GBTL).

The framework is based on an analysis of existing literature and descriptions of GBTL in varied higher education settings, combined with case examples of the author’s personal experience as instructors of GBTL courses.

Four frames or categories of GBTL approaches were identified: the action frame, the structuring frame, the bridging frame and the design frame. Each frame represents a spectrum of related yet varied strategies and assumptions.

This framework is a first attempt at providing an analytic tool for making sense of the varied instantiations of GBTL in higher education. It can be useful as a heuristic tool for researchers as well as a generative model for designing future GBTL practices.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate tertiary students’ acceptance of digital game-based learning (DGBL). Specifically, it investigated the influence of learning motivation, enjoyment, and perceived usefulness on students’ behavioral intention to play an information literacy (IL) game.

In total, 150 tertiary students were recruited to play an IL game, and fill in a survey questionnaire. Multiple linear regression was performed.

Results indicated that attention, satisfaction, affective enjoyment, and perceived usefulness were significant determinants for the behavioral intention to play IL games. However, relevance, confidence, cognitive enjoyment, and behavioral enjoyment were not found to predict their behavioral intention.

The authors did not consider other factors in the hypotheses, such as the mediating effects of enjoyment on behavioral intention, and the influence of students’ individual characters such as learning styles or personalities on their behavioral intention of using DGBL. Further, the IL game used in the study, Library Escape, may reduce generalizability of the results. The study used self-reported attitudinal data from survey questionnaires, while behavioral data were not considered.

The results showed that pedagogical features, enjoyment factors, and perceived usefulness remain critical in the uptake of IL games by students. Further, the study demonstrated that instead of behavioral or cognitive dimensions of enjoyment, players are more concerned with affective enjoyment. Hence, developing DGBL with affective features should be pursued.

By taking into consideration both pedagogical and gameplay characteristics of DGBL to explain students’ acceptance of IL games, this study integrates and extends previous studies in the context of IL games. Additionally, instead of using perceived enjoyment as a single dimensional construct, this study adopted a multifaceted, more nuanced perspective on the perceived enjoyment of DGBL.

This paper provides a general review related to a wider project, aimed at developing a mobile game-based app on Education for Sustainable Development within a smart learning city environment. It aims to address guidelines for a new action-oriented transformative pedagogy that is essential for the development of key competencies for sustainable development based on literature review and on the exploration of a previously created mobile game-based app – the EduPARK app.

This work gives continuity to the developed work, through a qualitative interpretive methodology of case study. Its main objective is to analyze the opinion of Higher Education students, who have experienced the EduPARK app, in what concerns the impact of the educational strategy into: (1) learning value, (2) authentic learning, (3) lifelong learning, and (4) conservation and sustainable habits. Data collection instruments involve students’ reflections triangulated to a questionnaire.

The study finds that the potential for promoting conservation and sustainable habits is widely recognized by app users, although they mention that this aspect can be further explored. This legitimates the relevance of the new mission – EduCITY, which focuses on enhancing sustainability key skills of citizens who participate in extension game-based activities on strategic paths in the city.

This paper comprises a set of guidelines and best practices for educational stakeholders and decision makers in order to enhance a wider integration of this outdoor mobile innovative approach in education, promoting smart and sustainable attitudes of citizens within the cities.

Instructional design students’ training may not include game-based learning (GBL). This paper aims to review the literature on GBL to determine the role of the instructional designer who is interested in GBL approaches to enhance learning especially for the novice learner.

The methodology for determining the instructional designers’ roles is based on the comparison of game-based and traditional instructional design and the identification of what is needed to aid instructors and designers in development and evaluation of GBL products.

The literature reveals that GBL shows learning potential. The existence of slim empirical research cannot posit GBL effectiveness in general, within specific disciplines, or with specific learner types. If GBL is to be effectively included in instructional design, the instructional designers, game designers and educational stakeholders need to collaborate to understand and combine optimal design features that meet both game and education objectives and to develop a common nomenclature so that research and its findings can be effectively communicated.

This review identifies specific digital game-based strategies that align with the learning goals sought in instructional design, differences between game and instructional design and steps needed for the instructional designer to bridge gaps in knowledge or practice between educators, researchers, game designers and instructional designers. These identifications may aid all GBL stakeholders in development of future GBL.