PHD AND MASTER THESES ON GAMES AND EDUCATION: A REVIEW OF THE PORTUGUESE LITERATURE

The use of games in education is a field mined with a diversity, and sometimes confusion, of practices and approaches, where is tough to conduct standardized research that produces incontestable results, and that faces several barriers to its implementation inside educational systems. Despite all the hustle involved, the interest in the use of games as tools to teach and learn continues to grow.

While that holds true internationally, it is important to understand what is happening locally. An interesting way to measure the attention this field is gaining at a national level is to understand the research that is being conducted by postgraduate students. Master students are at a stage where they are both being taught about, and researching, trending subjects, while doctoral students are pursuing innovative subjects or approaches with more time and more in-depth. Together they are being shaped by, and contributing to shape, the tendencies of research inside higher education institutions.

The main goals of our study are:
1. To identify the doctoral and master theses developed in Portugal within the area of games and education.
2. To categorize the selected theses using the game-based teaching and learning frames purposed by Holmes and Gee (2016).

The data is retrieved through the RENATES platform, a database from the Portuguese General Direction of Statistics of Education and Science (DGEEC - Direção-Geral de Estatísticas da Educação e Ciência), that collects official information on doctoral theses and master's dissertations held in Portugal. All theses that include the words “game(s)” or “videogame(s)” in the title are collected for analysis, with the theses from educational sciences’ courses being selected for further classification. The title, abstract and keywords are then examined in order to categorize each thesis as studying one of the following game-based teaching or learning approaches: action frame, structuring frame, bridging frame and design frame.

With this paper we intend to contribute to a better understanding of the research conducted by Portuguese doctoral and master students within the area of games and education, in order to grasp the amount of effort that has been devoted to this area, and identify what are the most common approaches to the use of games in education in Portugal.