Use of a serious game for secondary education: Students behavior and epistemic modelling

This paper describes an empirical research into the use of a serious game for geology teaching. The research was carried out with 61 secondary students. The traces of the learners/players are use to design a behavioural and epistemic model of the learners/gamers. The spontaneous strategy that they use is based on trial and error. This strategy is not relevant and leads to failure; therefore, a majority of students shift to a hypotheticodeductive approach and then succeed in reaching the goals of the game and in developing new procedural knowledge. Mainly based on the Theory of Didactical Situations, in the article we analyse the results of the research and their implications in term of game-design and integration of a serious game into a learning situation. © 2011 Lavoisier, Paris.