A mobile serious game about diabetes self-management: Design and evaluation.

Type 2 Diabetes Mellitus (T2DM) is a chronic condition that requires ongoing self-management and education. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in utilizing mobile serious games as a tool for patient education and engagement. This article presents the development of DiaPo, a mobile serious game designed to improve self-management education for patients with T2DM. DiaPo integrates gamification techniques to increase patient engagement and motivation while providing essential information about disease management. The development of DiaPo followed a structured design process, utilizing the Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation (ADDIE) educational system. This systematic approach allowed for the integration of best practices in educational game design and diabetes care. The development team consisted of experts in medical informatics, game design, and diabetes care, ensuring a multidisciplinary approach to the game's creation. The game's narrative focuses on a T2DM patient who earns positive points for making healthy lifestyle choices and negative points for poor ones. This gamified approach aims to reinforce positive behaviors and provide immediate feedback on negative ones. Interactive animations confirm or deny options selected by the player, further enhancing the learning experience. DiaPo offers a flexible and adaptable platform suitable for diverse audiences, promoting inclusiveness and accessibility in T2DM education. DiaPo represents a novel approach to self-management education for patients with T2DM, utilizing gamification techniques and a multidisciplinary design process to create an engaging and informative mobile serious game. By promoting inclusiveness and accessibility, DiaPo has the potential to empower patients with T2DM to take an active role in their disease management. As the field of mobile serious games continues to evolve, DiaPo stands as a promising tool for improving T2DM education and patient outcomes.

Exploring the role and mechanisms of environmental serious games in promoting pro-environmental decision-making: a focused literature review and future research agenda.

Environmental serious games aim to heighten players' awareness and comprehension of environmental issues, thus fostering pro-environmental decision-making. Research to date has affirmed these games' effectiveness in enhancing environmental knowledge and abilities, elevating consciousness regarding environmental matters, and promoting pro-environmental behavioral intentions and actions. Nonetheless, a detailed exploration into the precise mechanisms facilitating these impacts remains scarce. Leveraging theories of motivation, cognition, affect, and behavior, this paper outlines four hypothesized mechanisms of influence and introduces an Embodied-Enactive Cognition Model as a novel perspective. It suggests that future research should expand its inquiry into the multifaceted factors that influence pro-environmental decision-making, deepen the comprehension of the intrinsic mechanisms at play, pioneer novel research methodologies, and diversify the array of categories and contextual applications of environmental serious games.

Exploring the potential of pantomime games in medical education: Non-verbal exercise.

The primary educational challenge in medical education is the lack of focus on non-verbal communication skills, such as body language, facial expressions, and gestures. This gap is crucial, particularly in multicultural and multilingual contexts where non-verbal cues can bridge language barriers and enhance understanding between healthcare professionals and patients. To address this, our wave explores the potential of integrating art, specifically pantomime games, into medical education as a non-verbal exercise. Inspired by ancient drama and role-play, pantomime games offer an innovative methodology for enhancing non-verbal communication skills. These games help students develop observation, empathy, and ambiguity tolerance-skills essential for effective healthcare delivery. Incorporating art and game-based learning into medical curricula has improved visual perception, personal reflection, and student engagement. The benefits of this integration extend globally, fostering emotional intelligence, creative thinking, and cross-cultural understanding. Educational games create a safe environment for students to experiment, learn from mistakes, and gain practical experience, ultimately reducing training time and instructor load. Moreover, non-verbal communication training can enhance professor-student interactions, improving feedback quality and learning outcomes. To implement these innovations, clear guidelines and effective facilitation are crucial. Educators should provide supportive environments for experimentation and learning, using minimal materials such as open spaces and simple props. High-resource settings can leverage AI technologies for feedback and create mobile applications to modernize the approach. This wave advocates for a student-centered, multimodal communication and learning environment, highlighting the transformative potential of integrating performing arts into medical education to prepare future healthcare providers better.

Development and Validation of a Game for Older Adults on Lifestyles and Frailty.

BACKGROUND: Games are a promising strategy for rehabilitating older adults. The effect of games on promoting healthy lifestyles and preventing frailty remains uncertain. This article aims to describe the process of development and validation of the game "Bem-me-quer para a saúde"® to promote the acquisition of healthy lifestyles and prevent frailty in over 65-year-olds. METHODS: This study comprised three distinct phases, spanning from December 2023 to June 2024. The first phase comprised a thorough review of the scientific literature on the frailty and lifestyles of older adults, a second phase of game design, and a third phase of content and semantic validation conducted by specialized nurses and older adults. RESULTS: After revising literature, this study utilized an e-Delphi with a panel of 14 specialist nurses who underwent two rounds of evaluation. The "Bem-me-quer para a saúde"® game includes a puzzle board with 54 pieces and 30 educational cards. In the final phase, we evaluated the game on a cohort of 50 older adults, highlighting its reflective, interactive, and educational aspects. CONCLUSIONS: The game presented sufficient evidence of content validity and relevance to clinical practice. We should conduct additional research to evaluate its impact on lifestyle modification and frailty prevention.

Gamify4LexAmb: a gamification-based approach to address lexical ambiguity in natural language requirements.

Ambiguity is a common challenge in specifying natural language (NL) requirements. One of the reasons for the occurrence of ambiguity in software requirements is the lack of user involvement in requirements elicitation and inspection phases. Even if they get involved, it is hard for them to understand the context of the system, and ultimately unable to provide requirements correctly due to a lack of interest. Previously, the researchers have worked on ambiguity avoidance, detection, and removal techniques in requirements. Still, less work is reported in the literature to actively engage users in the system to reduce ambiguity at the early stages of requirements engineering. Traditionally, ambiguity is addressed during inspection when requirements are initially specified in the SRS document. Resolving or removing ambiguity during the inspection is time-consuming, costly, and laborious. Also, traditional elicitation techniques have limitations like lack of user involvement, inactive user participation, biases, incomplete requirements, etc. Therefore, in this study, we have designed a framework, Gamif ication for Lex ical Amb iguity (Gamify4LexAmb), for detecting and reducing ambiguity using gamification. Gamify4LexAmb engages users and identifies lexical ambiguity in requirements, which occurs in polysemy words where a single word can have several different meanings. We have also validated Gamify4LexAmb by developing an initial prototype. The results show that Gamify4LexAmb successfully identifies lexical ambiguities in given requirements by engaging users in requirements elicitation. In the next part of our research, an industrial case study will be performed to understand the effects of gamification on real-time data for detecting and reducing NL ambiguity.

TechMark: a framework for the development, engagement, and motivation of software teams in IT organizations based on gamification.

In today's fast-moving world of information technology (IT), software professionals are crucial for a company's success. However, they frequently experience low motivation as a result of competitive pressures, unclear incentives, and communication gaps. This underscores the critical need to handle these internal marketing challenges such as employee motivation, development, and engagement in IT organizations. Internal marketing practices aiming at attracting, engaging, and inspiring employees to use excellent services have become increasingly important. Internal marketing is attracting, engaging, and motivating employees as internal customers to utilize their quality services. Gamification has emerged as a significant trend over recent years. Despite the expanding use of gamification in the workplace, there is still a lack of focus on internal marketing tactics that incorporate gamification approaches. Thus, addressing the challenges related to employee motivation, development, and engagement is crucial. Therefore, as a principal contribution, this research presents a comprehensive framework designed to implement gamified solutions for software teams of IT organizations. This framework has been tailored to effectively address the challenges posed by internal marketing by optimizing motivation, development, and engagement. Moreover, the framework is applied to design and implement a gamified work portal (GWP) through a systematic process, including the design of low-fidelity and high-fidelity prototypes. Additionally, the GWP is validated through a quasi-experiment involving IT professionals from different IT organizations to authenticate the effectiveness of framework. Finally, the outclass results obtained by the gamification-based GWP highlight the effectiveness of the proposed gamification approach in enhancing development, motivation, and engagement while fostering ongoing knowledge of the employees.

Gamification in Mobile Apps for Children With Disabilities: Scoping Review.

BACKGROUND: Children with disabilities face numerous challenges in accessing health services. Mobile health is an emerging field that could significantly reduce health inequities by providing more accessible services. Many mobile apps incorporate gamification elements such as feedback, points, and stories to increase engagement and motivation; however, little is known about how gamification has been incorporated in mobile apps for children with disabilities. OBJECTIVE: This scoping review aims to identify and synthesize the existing research evidence on the use of gamification in mobile apps for children with disabilities. Specifically, the objectives were to (1) identify the categories of these mobile apps (eg, treatment and educational) (2), describe the health-related outcomes they target, (3) assess the types and levels of gamification elements used within these apps, and (4) determine the reasons for incorporating gamification elements into mobile apps. METHODS: We searched MEDLINE, PsycINFO, CINAHL, Embase, the ACM Digital Library, and IEEE Xplore databases to identify papers published between 2008 and 2023. Original empirical research studies reporting on gamified mobile apps for children with disabilities that implemented at least 1 gamification strategy or tactic were included. Studies investigating serious games or full-fledged games were excluded. RESULTS: A total of 38 studies reporting on 32 unique gamified mobile apps were included. Findings showed that gamified apps focus on communication skills and oral health in children with autism spectrum disorder while also addressing self-management and academic skills for other disability groups. Gamified mobile apps have demonstrated potential benefits across different populations and conditions; however, there were mixed results regarding their impact. The gamification strategies included fun and playfulness (23/32, 72%), feedback on performance (17/32, 53%), and reinforcement (17/32, 53%) in more than half of apps, whereas social connectivity was used as a gamification strategy in only 4 (12%) mobile apps. There were 2 main reasons for integrating gamification elements into mobile apps described in 16 (42%) studies: increasing user engagement and motivation and enhancing intervention effects. CONCLUSIONS: This scoping review offers researchers a comprehensive review of the gamification elements currently used in mobile apps for the purposes of treatment, education, symptom management, and assessment for children with disabilities. In addition, it indicates that studies on certain disability groups and examinations of health-related outcomes have been neglected, highlighting the need for further investigations in these areas. Furthermore, research is needed to investigate the effectiveness of mobile-based gamification elements on health and health behavior outcomes, as well as the healthy development of children with disabilities.

Development and Delivery of an Integrated Digital Health Care Approach for Children With Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis: Usability Study.

Background: Juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA) is a chronic inflammatory disorder with no cure. Most children are prescribed several medications aimed at controlling disease activity, managing symptoms, and reducing pain. Physical activity is also encouraged to retain musculoskeletal function. The primary determinants of treatment success are maintaining long-term adherence, ongoing monitoring by a pediatric rheumatologist, and involvement of an interdisciplinary team. To support these goals, a new digital intervention was developed, InteractiveClinics, which aimed to prompt children to take their medications, report pain levels, and increase their physical activity. Objective: This study aims to evaluate the usability of InteractiveClinics among children with JIA. Methods: As part of this pediatric cross-sectional study, 12 children were asked to wear a smartwatch for 2 weeks, which was synchronized to the InteractiveClinics phone app and web-based platform. Personalized notifications were sent daily to the watch and phone, to prompt and record medication adherence and pain level assessment. Physical activity was automatically recorded by the watch. At the end of the study, all children and parents completed a postintervention survey. Written comments were also encouraged to gain further feedback. Descriptive statistics were used to summarize the survey results, and all qualitative data underwent thematic analysis. Results: Twelve children aged 10 to 18 years (mean 14.2, SD 3.1 years; female: n=8, 66.7%) and 1 parent for each child (n=12; female: n=8, 66.7%) were enrolled in the study. Based on the highest and lowest agreement areas of the survey, most children and parents liked the smartwatch and web-based platform; they found it easy to learn and simple to use. They were also satisfied with the pain and physical activity module. However, usability and acceptability barriers that hindered uptake were identified in the phone app and medication module. Children required a unique in-app experience, and their suggestive improvements included more personalization within the app; simplification by removing all links not relevant to antirheumatic medications; flexibility in response times; improved conferment through gamification; additional comment fields for the input of more data, such as medication side effects or pain-related symptoms; more detailed graphical illustrations of the physical activity module, including a breakdown of metrics; and importantly, interconnections between modules, because medication adherence, pain levels, and physical activity can each influence the other. They were, overall, improving usefulness for children and parents. Conclusions: The usability of InteractiveClinics was positive. Children and parents liked the watch and web-based platform and were satisfied with the pain and physical activity module. However, children wanted a unique in-app experience through more personalization, simplification, flexibility, conferment, comment fields, graphical illustrations, a breakdown of metrics, and interconnections. Certainly, inclusions are needed to promote user adoption and advancement of new validated digital health interventions in pediatric rheumatology, to support the delivery of integrated care.

Design and rationale of the Engage-HF study: the impact of a gamified engagement toolkit on participation and engagement in a heart failure registry.

Aims: Heart failure (HF) registries provide valuable insights into patient management and quality of care. However, healthcare professionals face challenges due to the administrative burden of participation in registries. This study aims to evaluate the impact of education through an engagement toolkit on HF nurse practitioners' participation rate and data completeness in a national registry: the Netherlands Heart Registration-Heart Failure (NHR-HF) registry. Methods and results: Engage-HF is an observational study (intervention at the HF nurse level) with a pretest-posttest design within the participating hospitals. Between December 2022 and April 2024, 28 HF nurse practitioners from 12 hospitals will participate in a 24-week educational programme using the Engage-HF engagement toolkit. The main interaction platform in this toolkit is a gamified smartphone-based educational application called BrightBirds. The complete toolkit includes this educational application with weekly challenges, interactive posters, pop-ups, and alert messages, and a follow-up call at Week 4. The primary endpoints are the NHR-HF participation rates and data completeness at 1 and 6 months after using the toolkit. Additionally, we will analyse the experience of participants with the toolkit concerning their HF registry and knowledge of ESC 2021 HF guidelines. Conclusion: The Engage-HF study is the first to explore the impact of education through a gamified engagement toolkit to boost participation rates in a HF registry (NHR-HF) and test participant knowledge of the ESC 2021 HF guidelines. This innovative approach addresses challenges in the rollout of healthcare registries and the implementation of guidelines by providing a contemporary support base and a time-efficient method for education.

The Mediating Role of Problematic Use of Loot Boxes Between Internet Gaming Disorder and Online Gambling Disorder: Cross-Sectional Analytical Study.

Background: The video game industry has introduced a new form of monetization through microtransactions. A controversial example has been the so-called "loot boxes" (LBs) as virtual objects, which are randomized and bought with legal money. In recent years, LBs have come to connect 2 distinct problem behaviors, namely internet gaming disorder (IGD) and online gambling disorder (OGD). Many association studies have been conducted on the 3 constructs, but few have delved into the relationship of problematic use of LBs (PU-LB) with IGD and OGD. Objective: This study aims to explore the mediating role of the PU-LB between IGD and OGD. Methods: This cross-sectional and analytical study used incidental sampling in 24 Spanish schools. The final sample consisted of 542 participants (male: n=523, 96.5%; age: range 11-30 y) who played video games, bought LBs, and had gambled online in the last 12 months. Participants then completed the Spanish versions of the Internet Gaming Disorder Scale-Short Form, Online Gambling Disorder Questionnaire, and PU-LB scale. Results: IGD scores were found to be significantly associated with both PU-LB (r=0.473, P<.001) and OGD (r=0.209, P<.001). Moreover, PU-LB was significantly associated with OGD (r=0.351, P<.001). The structural equation model results indicated that IGD had no significant direct effect on OGD (P=.903). However, the indirect effect of IGD on OGD through PU-LB was significant (P<.001). Therefore, PU-LB fully mediated the relationship between IGD and OGD. Furthermore, these results were found in the subsamples of both minors (<18 y) and young adults (≥18 y). Conclusions: It is suggested that there is a mediation effect of problematic LB use between internet gambling and online gambling problems in both minors and young adults. This has potential practical implications by providing more evidence on how LBs have become a hinge feature between 2 clinically relevant and independent issues. In this regard, adequate industry self-regulation is needed, and effective legislation for the protection of minors is necessary.

Digital Gamification Tool (Let's Control Flu) to Increase Vaccination Coverage Rates: Proposal for Algorithm Development.

BACKGROUND: Influenza represents a critical public health challenge, disproportionately affecting at-risk populations, including older adults and those with chronic conditions, often compounded by socioeconomic factors. Innovative strategies, such as gamification, are essential for augmenting risk communication and community engagement efforts to address this threat. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to introduce the "Let's Control Flu" (LCF) tool, a gamified, interactive platform aimed at simulating the impact of various public health policies (PHPs) on influenza vaccination coverage rates and health outcomes. The tool aligns with the World Health Organization's goal of achieving a 75% influenza vaccination rate by 2030, facilitating strategic decision-making to enhance vaccination uptake. METHODS: The LCF tool integrates a selection of 13 PHPs from an initial set proposed in another study, targeting specific population groups to evaluate 7 key health outcomes. A prioritization mechanism accounts for societal resistance and the synergistic effects of PHPs, projecting the potential policy impacts from 2022 to 2031. This methodology enables users to assess how PHPs could influence public health strategies within distinct target groups. RESULTS: The LCF project began in February 2021 and is scheduled to end in December 2024. The model creation phase and its application to the pilot country, Sweden, took place between May 2021 and May 2023, with subsequent application to other European countries. The pilot phase demonstrated the tool's potential, indicating a promising increase in the national influenza vaccination coverage rate, with uniform improvements across all targeted demographic groups. These initial findings highlight the tool's capacity to model the effects of PHPs on improving vaccination rates and mitigating the health impact of influenza. CONCLUSIONS: By incorporating gamification into the analysis of PHPs, the LCF tool offers an innovative and accessible approach to supporting health decision makers and patient advocacy groups. It enhances the comprehension of policy impacts, promoting more effective influenza prevention and control strategies. This paper underscores the critical need for adaptable and engaging tools in PHP planning and implementation. INTERNATIONAL REGISTERED REPORT IDENTIFIER (IRRID): RR1-10.2196/55613.

Evaluation of a multicomponent positive psychology program to prevent gaming disorder and enhance mental wellness in primary pupils: A randomized controlled trial.

Background and Aims: Gaming disorder (GD) is a prevalent and complex issue that has recently been recognized as a condition that impairs mental health, underscoring the urgent need for early prevention measures. This evaluation study examined the effectiveness of the Digital Netizen Alliance (D.N.A.) program, a new multicomponent positive psychology program for preventing GD and bolstering mental wellness among Chinese children. Methods: Drawing on gamification and positive psychology principles, the program builds four key positive skills collectively referred to as the P-A-G-E framework: psychological resilience, active coping, growth mindset, and emotion regulation. A randomized controlled trial was conducted with 264 primary school pupils attending fourth, fifth, or sixth grade in Hong Kong (63% female; mean age = 10.83, SD = 1.18). Results: The findings revealed that participation in the program effectively promoted active coping, a growth mindset, and emotion regulation. Moreover, program participation alleviated GD symptoms and reduced negative affect. These desirable changes were fully explained by the P-A-G-E framework. Discussion and Conclusions: The new D.N.A. program, which cultivates the positive psychology skills specified in the P-A-G-E framework, facilitates favorable psychological changes among children. These results emphasize the importance of using multicomponent frameworks for interventions targeting GD prevention.

Utilizing Game-Based Learning in Literature Searching Instruction for Pharmacy Students.

OBJECTIVE: To determine whether gamifying librarian-led literature searching instruction improved student performance on an authentic literature searching assessment. Secondary objectives included determination of effect on email requests for assistance and student confidence in literature searching abilities. METHODS: Literature searching in PubMed is taught by a librarian to first-year pharmacy students in a drug information course over a 2-week period. The librarian chose to implement 2 game-based learning activities in the live lecture sessions: a crossword puzzle and an escape room. To increase engagement, students were encouraged to work collaboratively as a team during class. To evaluate the impact of incorporating gamification into literature searching instruction, the authors evaluated student grades on a literature searching assignment, reviewed the number of emails received asking for assistance, and evaluated student confidence in literature searching. RESULTS: Students scored higher on their literature searching assignment after the implementation of game-based instruction. The average grade on this assignment in 2022 was 90.1% compared with 2021 when the average was 79.9%. The average of 90.6% in 2023 also showed statistically significant improvement compared with 2021. Email requests decreased and student confidence increased when comparing 2021 outcomes with those in 2022 and 2023. CONCLUSION: Overall, the gamification of literature searching instruction in this course appears to have increased student assignment scores and was well-received by the students.

Using Games to Simulate Medication Adherence and Nonadherence: Laboratory Experiment in Gamified Behavioral Simulation.

Background: Medical nonadherence is a significant problem associated with worse clinical outcomes, higher downstream rehospitalization rates, and a higher use of resources. To improve medication adherence, it is vital for researchers and practitioners to have a solid theoretical understanding of what interventions are likely to work. To achieve this understanding, we propose that researchers should focus on creating small-scale laboratory analogs to the larger real-world setting and determine what interventions, such as nudges or incentives, work to change behavior in the laboratory. To do this, we took inspiration from the literature on serious games and gamification and experimental economics. We call our approach "gamified behavioral simulation." In this paper, we modeled everyday life as the state of being engaged in a simple but addictive game, illness as being interruptions to the functionality of that game, treatment as being a series of actions that can be taken to prevent or mitigate those interruptions, and adherence as sticking to a prescribed rule for the application of those actions. Objective: This study carries out a behavioral diagnosis of the medication adherence problem through a theoretically informed framework and then develops the gamified behavioral modeling approach to simulate medication nonadherence. Methods: A laboratory experiment was conducted using a modified popular and addictive open-source video game called "2048," which created an abstract model for the medication adherence behavior observed in real life. In total, 509 participants were assigned to the control and 4 intervention groups ("incentive" group, "reminder" group, "commitment device" group, and "elongated duration for symptoms" group). Results: The results of the modeling experiment showed that having theoretically informed interventions can increase the likelihood for them to be successful. In particular, there is evidence that the use of reminders improves the medication adherence rates for patients, and the same result was found in the modeling experiment, as they improved adherence significantly by 23% (95% CI -33.97% to -11.72%; P<.001). However, providing an incentive did not improve the adherence rate. We also tested the use of commitment devices, which, in line with real-world evidence, did not improve adherence rates. The fourth treatment tested elongated duration for symptoms, which attempted to show the power of modeling experiments where we test a what-if scenario that is extremely difficult to test in a real setting. The results indicated that if symptoms last longer, people did not adhere more to their medication regimen. Conclusions: Gamified behavioral simulation is a useful tool to explain real health behaviors and help in identifying which interventions are most likely to work in a randomized trial.

The Effects of Implementing Gamification in the Hepatology Curriculum for Medical Students.

Background Gamification, the incorporation of game theory into the curriculum, has been correlated with improved knowledge retention compared to standard didactics. Objective To determine the impact of gamified hepatology modules on medical student knowledge retention and exam performance. Methods We created three web-based, gamified hepatology modules with 15-question pre- and post-tests. Differences in each module's pre- and post-test scores were compared using paired t-tests. Medical school exam scores (total score and hepatology-specific score) in module users versus non-users were compared using independent two-sample t-tests. Results Module completion yielded significant increases in pre- to post-test scores for the jaundice (p=0.002) and anatomy modules (p<0.001). Module users scored 1.2 points higher on the total exam score (p=0.4) and 2 points higher on the hepatology exam score (p=0.31). Post-module survey results revealed higher knowledge retention in hepatology topics, expanded interest in hepatology, and an increased inclination to use web-based learning platforms for future learning experiences. Conclusion Module use led to improved post-test scores in the modules. Module users also had higher hepatology exam and total exam scores, yet, this difference was not statistically significant. Overall, this study suggests that gamification may be beneficial in aiding hepatology knowledge recall.

Effects of game-based learning on academic outcomes: A study of technology acceptance and self-regulation in college students.

Objective: This study investigates the interplay between the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), self-regulation strategies, and academic self-efficacy, and their collective impact on academic performance and perceived learning among college students engaged in remote education. Methods: A sample of 872 university students from Southern China participated in this study. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) was employed to analyze the theoretical relationships among the variables. The research focused on two primary areas: the connection between academic self-efficacy and gameful self-regulation strategies within the framework of TAM, and the influence of TAM's three dimensions on students' perceived learning and academic performance. Results: Findings highlight self-efficacy and gameful self-regulation strategies, in enhancing technology acceptance. Improved acceptance of technology is shown to positively affect academic performance and the perceived learning experience of students in classes using game-based online resources. Conclusion: The study emphasizes the significance of self-efficacy and gameful self-regulation strategies in shaping students' perceptions and attitudes towards technology. These factors are found to be key determinants of both perceived learning and academic achievement in the context of game-based online resource classes.

Evaluating the efficacy of computer games-based learning intervention in enhancing English speaking proficiency.

The use of learning games in education, particularly for second language (L2) acquisition, has gained significant traction recently, establishing game-based learning as a notable academic discipline. This study examines how computer game-based learning influences ESL undergraduates' speaking abilities, comparing traditional teaching methods with game-based teaching techniques. The study employed action research utilizing a control-experimental groups technique with a sample of 60 learners. Data were collected through observation sessions, interviews, as well as pre-tests and post-tests on English speaking skills. Upon comparing the scores of the control and experimental groups, the experimental group showed greater improvement in speaking skills. This study provides significant insights into the area of game-based learning using computers, particularly among international students in ESL contexts.

A future classroom lab with active and gamified STEAM proposal for mathematics and science disciplines: Analyzing the effects on pre-service teacher's affective domain.

The recent emergence of innovative learning spaces, Future Classroom Lab (FCL), provides educators the use of physical learning spaces (to research, interact, exchange, develop, create, and present) and diverse technological tools to work according to active methodologies. Learners become more active in the learning process with the introduction of innovative learning environments that enable the application of interdisciplinary STEAM methodology and foster the development of 21st century competences. This study aims to uncover the probable link between application active and gamified STEAM educational interventions in the FCL and Pre-Service Teachers' (PSTs) affective domain. The findings obtained showed statistically significant variations and, therefore, positive effects on the PSTs' affective domain (self-efficacy, attitude, and emotion) after performing the intervention. The sample consisted of a total of 54 PSTs enrolled in the second year of Primary Education. Limited studies regarding the affective domain in the FCL were found, which restricted the comparison with prior research. This study has several implications, such as the introduction of innovative educational proposals to PSTs at the university level and, consequently, the implementation of similar interventions in elementary schools. This research intended to reveal how the different variables work as a support system for students' learning process in mathematics and science disciplines.

Evaluation of the quality of oral hygiene mobile apps for children using the mobile app rating scale.

BACKGROUND: With the increased use of smartphones, mobile applications (apps) aimed at promoting healthy behaviors have experienced exponential growth. OBJECTIVES: This study aimed to provide an overview of mobile apps that use gamification to motivate children to maintain optimal oral hygiene and to evaluate the quality of the oral hygiene apps for children (OHACs) available in the Turkish Google Play Store and the Apple Store. METHODS: Between January 20 and February 2, 2024, OHACs were searched in the Turkish Google Play Store and the Apple Store. Seven apps were assessed using the Mobile Application Rating Scale (MARS) and evidence-based dentistry criteria (EBD). We used Microsoft Office Professional 2016 (Microsoft Excel 2016; Microsoft Corp, Redmond, WA, USA) and IBM SPSS Statistics version 29 for Windows (IBM Corp, Armonk, NY, USA) for all the data analyses and visualizations. RESULTS: The best overall MARS scores were obtained for Dis Doktoru: Dentist (3.53 ± 0.15) and Dis Hekimi Oyunlari: Dentist Game (3.72 ± 0.33). The worst overall MARS scores were obtained for Truthbrush (2.76 ± 0.06) and Mimizaur (2.85 ± 0.09). Hayvan Dis Hekimi: Animal Dentist, Dis Hekimi Oyunlari, and the Brush Teeth Game: Kids Dentist included the most evidence-based content. CONCLUSION: Most OHACs achieved moderate MARS scores for promoting oral hygiene habits among children. Improving the quality and educational content of OHACs could increase personal oral care motivation in children. More research is required to determine the long-term effects of the apps and whether they align with oral hygiene guidance.