PROCEEDINGS OF THE 18TH ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON RESEARCH IN UNDERGRADUATE MATHEMATICS EDUCATION
2015
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Investigating the effectiveness of an instructional video game for calculus: Mission prime
Page: 660
Effective educational video games have been both created and researched in the K-12 literature (e.g., Riconscente, 2013), yet instructional games created for undergraduate mathematics and the relevant research in their effectiveness is scarce. As a team of researchers and game developers, we created an instructional video game, named Mission Prime, based on the concept of optimization in calculus. The game brings players into a visually complex and engaging world in which they perform tasks involving essential calculus content (in this case, optimization). We aimed to research the effectiveness of the game as compared to both homework and to no treatment and believe that, if given an environment that has visual-spatial manipulatives and no punishment for incorrectness, students could enhance their understanding of the mathematical content.