Abstract
Serious games are becoming an alternative educational method in a variety of fields because of their potential to improve the quality of learning experiences and to facilitate knowledge acquisition and content understanding. Moreover, entertainment-driven learners are more easily motivated to benefit from the learning process through meaningful activities defined in a game context. Interfacing educational computer games with multisensorial interfaces allows for a seamless integration between virtual and physical environments. Multisensorial cues can improve memory and attention and increase the cognitive and sensory-motor performance. Despite of the increasing knowledge in sensory processes, multisensory experiences and interactions in computer based instruction remain insufficiently explored and understood. In this paper, we present a multisensory educational game - Fragrance Channel - and we investigate how enabling olfaction can contribute to users' learning performance, engagement and quality of experience. We compare results obtained after experiencing Fragrance Channel in the presence and absence of olfactory feedback on both a mobile and a PC. A knowledge test administered before and immediately after showed that our proposed educational game led to an improvement of performance in all the explored conditions. Subjective measurements carried out after the olfactory experience showed that students enjoyed the scenario and appreciated it as being relevant.
Highlights
Video games are a mainstream form of entertainment with a continuously increasing amount of time spent by children and adolescents playing them
As we shown there are studies that address the impact of olfaction on key elements of both entertainment and learning performance, educational games were not paired with odours with the exception of a chemistry educational environment [52]
Our results showed that stimulating various senses in an educational game engages the users and has potential to improve the learning process
Summary
Video games are a mainstream form of entertainment with a continuously increasing amount of time spent by children and adolescents playing them. Digital technologies have a significant impact on users, challenging them into new perceptual and cognitive actions. Given their audience and popularity, it is natural to consider them an interesting alternative in which educational content can be delivered. Platforms like AltspaceVR1 bring new possibilities for transformative experiences through a wide spectrum of interaction resources. This will influence the uptake of serious games that are already used as a tool for teachers to supplement traditional training methods in various domains, such as science and healthcare training [35]. Multisensory information representation in a computer game facilitates schema construction by offering the learner an explicit representation of a concept [17]
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