The Significance of Emotional Support to Students in Game-based Learning

Abstract

VISOLE (Virtual Interactive Student-Oriented Learning Environment) is a teacher-facilitated pedagogical approach to empower game-based learning. In combination with scaffolding, near real-life gaming participation, reflection, and debriefing, VISOLE aims at providing students with opportunities to acquire subject specific knowledge in a multi-disciplinary fashion and sharpen their higher-order thinking skills for problem solving. Farmtasia is the first online game developed based on this approach. We carried out a qualitative case study in Hong Kong for investigating students’ learning process in VISOLE. This paper discuses a part of the entire study, focusing on delineating (1) an impeding phenomenon, unsustainable gaming, which emerged in an “angry” student’s learning process, and (2) how the teacher’s emotional support mitigated this phenomenon. The findings shed light on the enhancement of the current design of VISOLE.