Leveraging metacognitive prompts in construction educational games for higher educational gains

ABSTRACT

The inclusion of technology in the classroom environment has brought the adoption of a variety of pedagogical intervention such as educational simulation games, which have illustrated a growing potential of stimulating students’ learning. In particular, an educational simulation game, the virtual construction simulator (VCS), has been evaluated for its ability to instil in students’ construction skills. The goal of this study was to further evaluate the pedagogical potential of specific design features of the VCS, a prompt within the simulation to enhance learning. To evaluate the pedagogical value of the prompt, the research team recruited 65 engineering students to participate in a quasi-experiment. In the experiment, the participants were split into two groups, an experimental group that played with the prompt, and a control group that played without the prompt. Based on a statistical analysis, the research team found that both groups significantly gained problem-solving skills. The experimental group, significantly increased their problem-solving skills when compared to the control group. Based on the analysis of the results the research team provided an insight into the value of metacognitive prompts in educational simulation games. This conclusion can support game developers in considering such prompts in their future games.

KEYWORDS:

• Construction education
• engineering education
• problem-solving
• serious games
• simulation games

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank all of the student participants, along with the researchers who have worked on the development of previous versions of the Virtual Construction Simulator.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

We thank the National Science Foundation [Grant #1226204] for support of the VCS4 game project. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.