dc.description.abstract | The spread of drugs causes serious problems recently. To enhance people awareness of drugs’ harm, several approaches were adopted to deliver anti-drug materials. However, limitations were observed in these approaches. Thus, this research develops a game-based anti-drug system (GADS), which incorporates anti-drug materials into game-based learning.
However, previous research indicated that game-based learning may cause some problems, such as the increase of learners’ cognitive overload. Nevertheless, not all of learners can overcome these problems because learners have diverse characteristics. Thus, two approaches, i.e., customization and personalization, can be applied to accommodate students’ individual differences, especially drug addiction and prior game knowledge. However, such two approaches have different advantages and disadvantages. Thus, there is a need to compare the effectiveness of these two approaches.
In order to get a complete understanding of whether the customized and personalized GADS are suitable to learners with different levels of drug addiction and prior game knowledge, two empirical studies were conducted. In Study One, a customized game-based anti-drug system (CGADS) is developed and drug experience and prior game knowledge were considered as a target to investigate learners’ reactions to the CGADS. The results indicated that non-addictive learners had better game performance and learning performance than addictive learners Moreover, non-addictive learners focused on playing digital games while addictive learners focused on learning anti-drug materials during the gaming process. On the other hand, learners with high prior game knowledge showed better game performance and they thought that the CGADS was too simple while learners with low prior game knowledge frequently completed the game quests and they did not favor the game hints provided by the CGADS.
Based on such different preferences, a personalized game-based anti-drug system (PGADS) was developed to further examine how drug addiction and prior game knowledge affected learners’ reactions to the CGBLS and PGBLS differently in Study Two. The results showed that learners with the PGADS had better learning performance and perceptions than those with the CGADS. Moreover, learners with the PGADS learned the anti-drug materials completely. Based on the results of each study, a framework is produced. This framework can be applied to support researchers, learners and designers to promote the effectiveness of game-based anti-drug systems.
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