Abstract:

The last years, the use of Serious Games for the learning of History and Culture is widespread. Serious Games is a group of digital games that aim to learning in an entertaining way. Research studies have resulted that cooperation among teachers, students and game developers is important factor for the implementation of games of good quality.

Especially when the targeted learners are children and teenagers, the graphical user interface (GUI) and user experience (UX) is one of the most important feature of serious games. An educational game must be attractive and reach the levels of experience of the entertainment digital games, with which the children today are most familiar. The paper focuses on the overall evaluation of a 3D digital game. Its development is based on learning theories of constructivism of Piaget and social constructivism of Vygotsky regarding the implementation of an educational serious digital game. The students are involved in the game where they are able to take a tour of “El Greco’s Travels and Artwork”.

The scope of this survey is to identify two types of impact of utilization of 3D games as an educational tool. The first is about game’s educational value in terms of knowledge about culture the students really gain by playing. The second type is about the acceptance of such a game by the students. We seek to find if educational games that have similar graphics and gameplay with commercial entertainment games are able to attract students to play them by own and not when someone (teacher or parent) urge them to do it.

The evaluation process was conducted on students of the primary and secondary Greek school (ages between 6 and 15) and it is based both on questionnaires especially designed to depict the overall gained knowledge and experience of the game’s users. The analysis of the questionnaire results coincides with the results found in other similar works. Indeed, the use of digital games in cultural education aims at better learning and enforce their motivation to learn more about a specific subject.

Keywords:

Serious Games, Cultural Education, 3D Games, primary and secondary education.