Browsing by Author "Watson, Diane"

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    The design and evaluation of a classroom exergame
    (ACM, 2013) Watson, Diane; Mandryk, Regan L.; Stanley, Kevin G.
    Balancing academic, physical and emotional needs of students while maintaining student interest is increasingly challenging in the resource constrained environments of the modern classroom. To answer this need we created and evaluated an exergame system called Vortex Mountain, which leverages the physical benefits of exercise and the motivational benefits of educational games to provide a healthy and engaging classroom activity for middle school students. Through a controlled study, we demonstrate that our classroom exergame provides similar affective, engagement, and learning benefits to an exercise or game intervention, while leveraging the valuable ancillary benefits of each. Thus, we believe that exergames have a future in the modern classroom and possess significant potential for future technical and pedagogical research.
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    Gamifying behaviour that leads to learning
    (ACM, 2013) Watson, Diane; Hancock, Mark; Mandryk, Regan L.
    Many courses require self-study to succeed. This is especially true of online courses. However, self-study activities, such as reading the textbook and completing the associated workbook, are not motivating and do not contribute directly to grades. As a result many students do not complete these activities and this may lead to a lower understanding of the material and a lower overall grade in the class. In this paper we present the prototype of a casual game, Reading Garden, which encourages self-study through casual gameplay.