Technological solutions to fostering students’ moral courage: an augmented reality-based contextual gaming approach

Abstract

Fostering students’ knowledge and courage to face illegal or immoral problems is a critical aim in educational settings. However, it is challenging for students who lack knowledge and social experience to comprehend the sins behind the immoral cases and have the moral courage to deal with those problems. Therefore, in the present study, an approach combining AR with game-based learning (ARGBL) was proposed. Furthermore, a quasi-experimental design was adopted to examine the effectiveness of the approach in terms of developing students’ moral courage regarding anti-corruption and their learning satisfaction. The participants were recruited from two classes in a university. One class with 30 students was assigned to be the experimental group who played the developed game for 4 weeks; the other class with 30 students was the control group who learned with the conventional technology-based learning (C-TL) mode (i.e. the teacher gave lectures using slides and multimedia). The results revealed that the experimental group’s moral courage and learning satisfaction was significantly higher than those of the control group. The findings of this study provide a reference for those intending to foster students’ moral courage when facing other immoral cases.