Game-Based Religion Education In Virtual Environments: A Pilot Study

The corona pandemic is forcing all educational institutions to use numerous digitized forms of teaching due to strict contact restrictions. Since students grow up in an environment already shaped by technology, the assumption arises that such virtual teaching methods, especially those integrating immersive technology, could enhance the learning process of the students. Especially in the subject Religion, abstract, often intangible topics without immediate relation to the students' everyday lives are addressed, resulting in students lack of motivation and interest. As several theories and studies have already shown that digitized forms of learning have a supporting effect on factors relevant for students' learning, a virtual learning environment for learning the topic “Professions in Jerusalem” of the subject Religion was developed, which is a market place in Bethlehem in the time of Jesus. As a time-traveling journalist, the player has the task of interviewing the various profession groups in order to write a newspaper article as the final product. To support the assumption that this virtual experience can foster learning in Religion classrooms, a small sample of ten preservice teachers was used to carry out a first pilot evaluation of the experience. The results of a pre-/post-test comparison give first indicators that factors influencing learning processes in the Religion classroom can be increased through game-based religion education experiences. To address some of the issues that occured during the study, the promotion and expansion of digitization seems to be of great priority to realize immersive teaching settings in the future.