Abstract
Serious games and gamified applications are increasingly used in a wide variety of contexts including education, corporate and military training, and healthcare to teach or train students and personnel in an engaging manner. Puzzle-based micro-games may be an advantageous method for quickly learning declarative knowledge, i.e. knowledge pertaining to facts and definitions. In military exercises and wargames, there is a need to quickly absorb declarative knowledge pertaining to a hypothetical scenario before beginning the exercise. In this work, an application of the micro-game concept within a military context, the Organizational Chart Puzzle (OCP) for learning a Command and Control (C2) structure, and results of usability testing are presented. The OCP was well-liked and easily learned by usability testing participants. Additionally, participants were asked to recreate the C2 structure from memory after playing the OCP and showed high knowledge transfer from the game to the paper test, suggesting this concept may be a viable path for quick learning of declarative knowledge.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Smith, R.: The long history of gaming in military training. Simul. Gaming 41(1), 6ā19 (2010)
Macedonia, M.: Games, simulation, and the military education dilemma. In: Internet and the University: 2001 Forum, Educause (2002)
Britannica, T.: America's Army. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 8 August 2011. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Americas-Army. Accessed 25 June 2021
America's Army: US Army. https://www.americasarmy.com/. Accessed 25 June 2021
Webster, R.: Declarative knowledge acquisition in immersive virtual learning environments. Interact. Learn. Environ. 24(6), 1319ā1333 (2015)
Abdul Jabbar, A.I.: Gameplay engagement and learning in game-based learning: A systematic review. Rev. Educ. Res. 85(4), 740ā779 (2015)
Freitas, S.D.: Are games effective learning tools? A review of educational games. J. Educ. Technol. Soc. 21(2), 74ā84 (2018)
Howard-Jones, P.A., Jay, T.: Reward, learning and games. Curr. Opin. Behav. Sci. 10, 65ā72 (2016)
Shabaneh, Y., Farrah, M.: The effect of games on vocabulary retention. Indonesian J. Learn. Instr. 2(01), 79ā90 (2019)
Olsen, T., Procci, K., Bowers, C.: Serious games usability testing: How to ensure proper usability, playability, and effectiveness. In: Marcus, Aaron (ed.) DUXU 2011. LNCS, vol. 6770, pp. 625ā634. Springer, Heidelberg (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21708-1_70
Brooke, J.: Sus: a āquick and dirtyā usability. Usability Eval. Indus. 11, 189 (1996)
Brooke, J.: SUS: a retrospective. J. Usability Stud. 8(2), 29ā40 (2013)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
Ā© 2021 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Godfrey, S.B., CaamaƱo Sobrino, P., Tremori, A. (2021). Micro-games for Quick Learning of Declarative Knowledge: Preliminary Application and Usability Testing. In: de Rosa, F., Marfisi Schottman, I., Baalsrud Hauge, J., Bellotti, F., Dondio, P., Romero, M. (eds) Games and Learning Alliance. GALA 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13134. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92182-8_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92182-8_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-92181-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-92182-8
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)