Are serious games a good strategy to improve students' level knowledge?

This article is interested in the integration of serious games in the classroom. Serious Games are computer applications that combine fun and serious aspects, and they are designed with a primary objective that is not entertainment. They are increasingly used in education as an educational tool. For this reason we developed five serious games for primary school student of CM1 and sixth grade, in order to acquire the mental calculation skill. This skill plays a very important role in the educational curriculum of learners in all education stages. We are also interested in assessing the potential effects that Serious Games can have on student learning. One promising approach is to use the playful video culture of students to motivate them in order to invest time in mathematics’ practice, especially mental calculation. We compared two scenarios: a group of participants used the classic method "Control group", and another group of participants used our Serious Games "Experimental group". A ttest using SPSS statistical software was carried out to test the existence of significant change in students’ performance based on the marks they scored on a test for a mental calculation before and after the introduction of serious games in students learning process. Based on the analysis carried out, the results of this study showed that the improvement of the experimental group was greater than the control group. The main conclusion of this study is the superiority of the experimental group over the test of learning outcomes and those serious games influence positively the motivation of learners. We can therefore say that the use of Serious Games in the classroom is more effective than the traditional method in our study