Towards applying Keller’s ARCS model and learning by doing strategy in classroom courses

Abstract

Recently, educational games are gaining increased interest from researchers since they are very motivating and interactive, and combine fun and learning strategies together. Therefore, teaching students how to develop their own educational games in universities is needed but challenging. Most courses available online simply use Portable Document Files (pdf) or Power Point (ppt), which can give students some information about educational games but not literally help them through the development process. This paper presents a pilot educational games development course evaluated with one hundred and thirty four undergraduate computer science students. In this course, learning by doing strategy and Keller’s ARCS motivational model are applied. The results showed that learning by doing strategy and the ARCS model help in improving student motivation, keeps them active, and helps them gain the needed technical skills to develop their own educational games. Researchers and practitioners can therefore benefit by applying learning by doing strategy and the ARCS model during the development of their classroom courses. Furthermore, this research has resulted in a set of recommendations which can help teachers during the preparation of their educational games development classroom courses.