Manuscript received May 21, 2023; revised July 10, 2023; accepted August 16, 2023.
Abstract—Serious games have been proven to be effective in
enhancing students learning of physics. Many educators have
investigated the integration of serious games in the classroom for
formal educational settings. In addition, they have reviewed the
trends development of game-assisted learning in many review
papers. However, in the subject of physics, the analysis of the
development of Serious games is still limited and overlooked
problem. As a consequence, this research paper aims to conduct
a systematic review of the empirical studies related to the use of
serious games in physics teaching between 2012 and 2021. A
total of 80 articles were included from Scopus and Web of
Science databases. Based on an in-depth analysis of the
quantitative data, several significant insights were generated in
this study including the following : (1) the number of published
articles has witnessed a dramatic growth in 2021; (2) computers
and education are the main contributing journals in the
empirical studies; (3) the highest proportion of the physics topics
is the mechanics theme; (4) junior high school students were the
most involved as sampling groups; (5) quantitative methodology
design was adopted in the majority of selected papers; (6)
American authors have contributed the most via a high number
of publications; (7) cognitive outcomes were the major
investigated research foci in Serious games-related studies.
Along with the systematic review, this study has implicitly
indicated some implications and suggestions that are in need of
further research and discussion.
Index Terms—Serious games, physics, educational settings,
systematic review
Mohamed Achour is with Laboratory of Computer Science and
Interdisciplinary Physics (LIPI), ENS, Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah
University, B.P 5206 Bensouda Fez, Morocco.
Jalal Khouna is with The Interdisciplinary Research Laboratory in
Didactic, Education and Training (LIRDEF), ENS, Cadi Ayyad University,
Marrakech 40130, Morocco.
Ahmed Tahiri is with Laboratory of Computer Science and
Interdisciplinary Physics (LIPI), ENS, Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah
University, B.P 5206 Bensouda Fez, Morocco.
*Correspondence: mohamed.achour1@usmba.ac.ma (M.A.)
Cite: Mohamed Achour*, Jalal Khouna, and Ahmed Tahiri, "The Use of Serious Games in Physics: A Review of Selected Empirical Studies from 2012 to 2021," International Journal of Information and Education Technology vol. 13, no. 12, pp. 1998-2003, 2023.
Copyright © 2023 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).