DiffGame: Game-based mathematics learning for physics

TL;DR

DiffGame is an engaging educational tool that uses game-like exercises to teach differentiation concepts to high-school students, resulting in measurable learning gains across different student performance levels.

Contribution

This paper introduces DiffGame, a novel game-based platform for teaching differentiation, and demonstrates its effectiveness through empirical testing with high-school students.

Findings

All student levels showed learning gains.

Middle-tier students exhibited the largest improvements.

DiffGame effectively enhances understanding of differentiation.

Abstract

Differentiation is a mathematical skill applied throughout science in order to describe the change of a function with respect to a dependent variable. Thus, an intuitive understanding of differentiation is necessary to work with the mathematical frameworks used to describe physical systems in the higher levels of education. In order to obtain this intuition repeated practice is required. This paper presents the development of DiffGame, which consists of a series of exercises that introduce the basic principles of differentiation for high-school students through game-like elements. DiffGame have been tested with 117 first-year students from a single Danish high school, who did not have any prior training in differentiation. The students' learning was assessed by the data obtained directly from DiffGame. The test demonstrated the efficacy of DiffGame, since students at all levels demonstrate a learning gain. In contrast to previous studies demonstrating most learning in the lower tier of students, the middle tier of students (based on overall performance) exhibits the largest learning gains.