Summary:    Effectiveness of Using Software Games in Education
Title:    “Combining Software Games with Education: Evaluation of its Educational Effectiveness”
Name:    Ladan Moshiri
Date:    04/19/2010

Reference:
Virvou, M., Katsionis, G., & Manos, K. (2005). Combining Software Games with Education: Evaluation of its Educational Effectiveness. JETS - Journal of Educational Technology & Society [online serial], 1,1. Retrieved April 18, 2010, from     http://www.ifets.info/journals/8_2/5.pdf

Problem:   This article states several issues concerning the educational effectiveness of software games through an evaluation study of an Intelligent Tutoring System (ITS) which operates as a virtual reality educational game.
The authors aim to answer the following questions:
1.   Why educational games have not reached the schools yet, in spite of being beneficial to students?
2.    Will the students who are usually distracted in a traditional classroom setting, be more engaging in the class activities, and perform better, when educational software is used in the classroom?
3.    How using educational software in the classroom will affect the performance of poor performing students?
4.    How using educational software in the classroom will affect the performance of well performing students?
5.   Will the students perform better when using an educational software which contains a story line and more graphic user interface, or by using a simpler and less graphically sophesticated educational software?

Context:
The authors studied five classes of fourth-grade students who attended elementary schools in Greece for a total of 90 students, and their geography teachers. All of these students were 9-10 years old, had a similar background on the use of computers, and had been trained in their respective schools in the use of Windows, the Internet and other software packages such as word-processors.
All of these 90 students first participated in a paper and pencil pre-test which contained 100 geography questions, and their scores were recorded. Later, these 90 participants were divided into two independent sub-groups of 45 students for the first part of the experiment, two independent sub-groups of 15 students for the second part of the experiment, two independent sub-groups of 15 students for the third part of the experiment and two independent sub-groups of 15 students for the fourth part of the experiment. The first sub-group of each group would use VR-ENGAGE and the second sub-group of each group would use the ITS with the simple UI (User Interface).
Later, the students’ performance in the pre-test was compared to their performance in a post-test that was given to them after the use of their respective software. The post-test was of a similar level of difficulty as the pre-test and consisted of the same number of questions (100).

Findings:

• The students’ overall test score for all participating students improved after using the two educational softwares. The results showed a greater improvement of the VR-ENGAGE users over the users of the other software.
  • In the post-test, the players of VR-ENGAGE made 43.15% less mistakes than in the pre-test.
  • The other sub-group of students that had used the simple ITS resulted in 32.48% less mistakes of their answers in total, as compared to the pre-test.
•  The poor performing students’ scores improved more in compare to well performing students after using both educational softwares.
• The results also showed a greater improvement of the VR-ENGAGE poor performing students over the poor performing students who used the other software.
• The reasons for educational games not reaching schools yet, is that  
1. Not all educators and parents are convinced that educational games can be beneficial to students.  
2. There are criticisms about the quality of the existing educational games.

Recommendations:
Based on the results of this study, it can be concluded that students will benefit from educational games in classrooms and will be pleased to work with a computer game, which represents a more pleasant teaching fashion than that of conventional educational software. In order to accomplish this:

• Parents and school officials must be educated about the immense benefits of using educational software games in the classrooms.
• More interactive, user-friendly, and exciting educational software must be available.
• Educational software games cannot replace the traditional classroom settings and must be combined with the traditional classroom environment to create a more captivating learning experience.