What Do Students Learn When Collaboratively Using A Computer Game in the Study of Historical Disease Epidemics, and Why?

The use of computer games and virtual environments has been shown to engage and motivate students and can provide opportunities to visualize the historical period and make sense of complex visual information. This article presents the results of a study in which university students were asked to collaboratively solve inquiry-based problems related to historical disease epidemics using game-based learning. A multimethod approach to the data collection was used. Initial results indicated that students attended to visual information with more specificity than text-based information when using a virtual environment. Models of student’s decision-making processes when interacting with the world confirmed that students were making decisions related to these visual elements, and not the inquiry process. Building on theories from the learning sciences, such as learning from animations/visualizations and computer-supported collaborative learning, in this article, the authors begin to answer the question of why students learned what they did about historical disease epidemics.