An Investigation of Affect Within Ibigkas!: An Educational Game for English

We investigated the affective states (both individual and shared emotions) of students using a collaborative and educational game for English called Ibigkas! Our goal was two-fold: (1) To determine the incidence and persistence of affective states exhibited by the students when working individually and in groups, and (2) to adapt the Baker Rodrigo Ocumpaugh Monitoring Protocol for collaborative learning situations. Our findings for this study are as follows: (1) in single-player mode, students exhibited greater engaged concentration, pride, and frustration and less excitement, delight, and confusion compared to the multiplayer mode; (2) that individual emotions can be distinct from group emotions; (3) that negative emotions like frustration and blame/guilt were only felt at the individual level and were not observed as shared by all the members of the group; (4) affective states tended to persist more within an individualized game setting compared to the collaborative game setting where there was a greater number of opportunities to experience a wider range of emotions, hence the low chance of persistence; (5) students within an individualized setting spent more time solving the game rounds, had fewer incorrect answers, even as they experienced more frustration, and finally, (6) students within a collaborative setting had fewer errors when they had a higher incidence of excitement and had more errors when they appeared to be concentrating due to the presence of the “gaming the system” behavior