Multi-Tutor Game: Electronic Game Worlds for Learning

Educational software has to be used by students for learning. Therefore educational applications have to be as attractive as possible to increase the engagement of students. To this end many educational software researchers employ several aspects of multimedia technology to improve the aesthetics and the appeal of educational software. However, there is a whole imposing culture of computer games that has not been exploited sufficiently for the purposes of education, although it is widely acknowledged that children and adolescents are fascinated by computer games. For example, Papert (1993) acknowledges the fact that the greatest amount of children’s time with the computer is devoted to playing games and Griffiths and Hunt (1995) who conducted a study among adolescents, found that approximately one third of the subjects of their sample played computer games every day and the same amount played once a month. Since children and adolescents are quite happy to spend many hours playing games then why not use the game culture for the purposes of education? Indeed there are many researchers who encourage this entertaining aspect of education (e.g. Inkpen 1994; Sedighian 1997; Amory et al. 1998). For the purpose of this kind of research, a tutoring system that incorporated games on multiple domains was developed. The system is called Multi-Tutor Game and provides many virtual reality worlds for adventure games in four domains, namely biology, history, spelling and mathematics.