Serious Gaming at School: Reflections on Students’ Performance, Engagement and Motivation

The concept of Serious Gaming refers to the adoption of classical entertainment games for purposes other than entertainment, including learning and instruction. In this paper we report on a Serious Gaming field experiment where typical board games (such as battleship, master mind and domino) were employed with the shifted purpose of triggering and sustaining primary school students ’ reasoning and logical abilities. The results of the field experiment showed that: 1) there is a strong correlation between school achievement and the ability to play and solve this kind of games and that 2) motivation and engagement in game-based learning tasks is very high, irrespective of the level of achievement of the subjects. Final considerations are drawn about the potential and the opportunity of adopting the considered games to support those reasoning skills that are widely recognized as transversal to any kind of learning and thus deeply affecting overall school performance