Exploring How Gender and Enjoyment Impact Learning in a Digital Learning Game

In digital learning games, do game mechanics that promote learning and those that promote enjoyment have different effects on students' experience? Do males or females learn from or enjoy games more? We explored these questions in Decimal Point, a digital learning game that teaches decimal numbers and decimal operations to middle school students. In this work, we conducted a classroom study with two versions of the game, one that encourages students to play to learn and one that encourages students to play for enjoyment. We compared these two conditions to a control condition that is neutral regarding learning and enjoyment. Our results indicated that the enjoyment-focused group learned more efficiently than the control group, and that females had higher learning gains than males across all conditions, particularly on the near and middle transfer learning items. Post hoc analyses also revealed that the learning-focused group engaged in re-practicing the same mini-games, while the enjoyment-focused group demonstrated more exploration of different mini-games. These findings suggest that emphasizing learning or enjoyment can result in distinctive gameplay behaviors from students, and that our game can help bridge the typical gender gap in math education.