Abstract
Considering the difficulties many students and even educated adults face with reasoning about fractions, the potential for serious games to augment traditional instructional approaches on this topic is strong. The present study aims at providing evidence for the validity of a serious game used for studying students’ conceptual knowledge of fractions. A total of 54 Finnish fifth graders played the math game on tablet computers using tilt-control to maneuver an avatar along a number line for a total of 30 min. Results indicated that most of the hallmark effects of fraction magnitude processing as identified in basic research on numerical cognition were successfully replicated using our serious game. This clearly suggests that game-based approaches for fraction education (even using tilt-control) are possible and may be effective tools for assessing and possibly promoting students’ conceptual knowledge of fractions.
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Acknowledgments
The current research was supported by the Leibniz-Competition Fund (SAW) supporting Manuel Ninaus (SAW-2016-IWM-3) and Academy of Finland supporting Kristian Kiili.
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Appendix: Fraction Comparison Pairs
Appendix: Fraction Comparison Pairs
See Table 1.
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Ninaus, M., Kiili, K., McMullen, J., Moeller, K. (2016). A Game-Based Approach to Examining Students’ Conceptual Knowledge of Fractions. In: Bottino, R., Jeuring, J., Veltkamp, R. (eds) Games and Learning Alliance. GALA 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10056. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50182-6_4
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