2018 - Serious Games in higher education: Students’ perceptions – The case of School of French of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.

Serious Games in higher education: Students’ perceptions – The case of School of French of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.

Krystalli, P., & Arvanitis, P. (2018). Serious Games in higher education: Students’ perceptions – The case of School of French of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Proceedings of 10th International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies (EDULEARN 2018), Palma 02-04/7/2018, (pp. 7849-7855). Palma de Mallorca, Spain: International Academy of Technology, Education and Development (IATED). ISBN: 978-84-09-02709-5, ISSN: 2340-1117, doi: 10.21125/edulearn.2018

In recent times there has been a great evolution in the creation of educational games, known as Serious games (SGs). SGs are environments that were designed based on a playful approach to learning for educational purposes.

Empirical studies and research have shown that SGs can provide innovative and student-centered pedagogies to players and help them become autonomous learners. Furthermore, they can enhance students’ motivation and engage them in inductive experiential learning. The purpose of this paper is to present findings of a study that was carried out in the School of French of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and which explores our students’ perceptions of serious games.

Specifically, we proposed to 30 undergraduate students of the School of French to use SGs as part of learning activities that were designed for learning the French language and precisely games, which can be used to improve students’ lexical, grammatical and orthographic competence. This case study took place during class time but also outside timetables hours. On completion of the game, students filled in a survey, which focused on students’ prior experiences of ICTs and game-based-learning and their perceptions of the use of SGs in the development of linguistic competences. Therefore, in this paper, we will first mention the educational benefits of the use of SGS in Higher Education (HE) as they appear in previous research. We will then describe the methodology that we use in the current study and present the results. Finally, we will discuss the findings, draw conclusions and talk about the potential of the use of SGs in HE.

Keywords: Mobile assisted language learning, language learning, language activities, foreign language.

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