Development of Cognitive Skills in Serious Mobile Games

Abstract

21st century cognitive and collaborative skills can be developed by providing learners with immersive activities where they have to work with others to solve problems. Serious mobile learning games can support such activities by leveraging the affordances of mobile devices such as location awareness, Internet connectivity and multimedia support. This paper describes a serious mobile learning game, developed for the Android platform, designed to allow learners to play the role of business consultants to an organization facing some serious challenges. The game uses mixed reality resources to lead the players through a realistic scenario, providing them with physical, cognitive and collaborative challenges. Focusing on key 21st century cognitive and collaborative skills, we present the result of an experiment designed to measure the effectiveness of the game in terms of the impact of working with others in higher level learning. We introduce the concept of coordinated individual flow experience as an analytical approach to evaluating the effects of delayed collaborative learning. Our results raise challenging questions about whether some learning experiences that encourage realistic team working may not be entirely compatible with emphasizing cognitive skills.