Designing cognitive-based game mechanisms for mobile educational games to promote cognitive thinking: an analysis of flow state and game-based learning behavioral patterns

This study proposed a cognitive-based game mechanism based on the revised Bloom's taxonomy of cognitive processing dimensions. Moreover, a mobile Chinese history educational game, Void Broken: The Qing Dynasty, was developed based on the cognitive-based game mechanism to promote learners’ cognitive thinking in history learning. This empirical study conducted an experiment with a quasi-experiment design and the participants were 70 high school freshmen from northern Taiwan, who were selected by convenience sampling. The present study analyzed the participants’ historical knowledge gains and flow state. This study proposed an operational behavior coding scheme to analyze learning behaviors and evaluate the proposed cognitive-based game mechanism design and conducted sequential analyses to explore their learning behavioral patterns and their collaborative problem solving (CPS) behaviors in the game-based learning (GBL) process. The results suggested that the mechanism helped learners’ historical knowledge gains, flow, and CPS behaviors. The high flow groups showed more multifaceted and active problem-solving behavioral patterns than the low flow groups. We suggest educational game designers consider including the cognitive-based game mechanism and flow antecedents into their game designs.