Are You Game?

The use of gameful activities in education has been widely celebrated in recent years as an effective pedagogical method in engaging students, exciting cognitive abilities, and promoting mastery. Despite the popularity of game-based learning, to date, little has been done to analyze the impacts of introducing such interventions on students and instructors alike. We focus on hybrid teaching strategies that blend educational games with instructional scaffolding in introductory computer science teaching. We assess the effectiveness of incorporating these teaching strategies by leveraging various empirical evaluation techniques and study their impacts from three different dimensions: students' point of view, instructors' perspective, and students' performance. In addition, we establish correlations between students' approaches to learning and game-based learning, and further discuss how learning concentration and curiosity relate to students' perception of game-based activities.