A Study in History Teaching Using Serious Games

The goal of this study is to observe if having more interactivity and media richness in teaching will lead to more meaningful learning and remembering information longer, compared to more traditional teaching such as books and slideshow presentations. It has been revealed that using multimedia tools such as video games, which use different cognitive load-reducing methods, can help the learner use less irrelevant cognitive process. This will lead to more cognitive load being assigned to more relevant materials. Two groups of participants were compared to each other, where one group was asked to play a video game containing historical information about the city of Skövde, while the second group was presented with a slideshow containing the historical information but only as simple text. The results from the experiment suggested that there is a significant difference between the two groups, meaning the participants who were asked to play the video game has less difficulty in recalling information after 7 days compared to the group who only read the slideshow presentation