Commercial off-the-shelf games as learning media

Abstract

©2016 ACM. The purpose of this research is to explore some of the educational potentials of Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) games in the learning process. A survey on students' attitudes towards COTS games in education was conducted with a sample of 1262 upper grade primary school students, from 22 Serbian schools. Most of the students reported playing digital games for longer than five years. An independent sample t-test presented some significant differences between male and female attitudes towards the educational potential of the digital games. Most of the male respondents preferred arcades and sports genres, while the majority of female respondents preferred logical (puzzle) games. Overall, male students perceived games as more useful for school and career and they were also more interested to create and implement their own games, compared to female students.