April 2012 Volume 15 Number 2 - Educational Technology & Society

Tasks for computational fluency take the form of mini-games and are used to consolidate students’ computation
skills in terms of both speed and accuracy. Figure 4 illustrates two mini-games. The mini-game on the left involves
the addition of two three-digit numbers, while the mini-game on the right involves the multiplication of a two-digit
number multiplied by a one-digit number. Solving these types of problems has been demonstrated to be beneficial
for mathematics learning (Kilpatrick & Swafford, 2002).
Quest mechanism (middle tier)
Figure 4. Learning tasks for calculation fluency via mini-games
Game quest is selected as a guiding mechanism in the middle tier because of the following two advantages that it brings.
The first advantage is to offer a goal-oriented mechanism to guide students to participate in learning activities within a
game world. Quest-taking is a graceful way in role-playing games to lead students to conduct specific tasks. When
students conduct the tasks they received from non-player characters (NPCs), they might feel that they have more controls
and responsibility for the tasks, although the content of the tasks is actually the same. In other words, quest-taking might
turn students’ passive learning into active participation, because it offers students a clear and immediate goal to pursue.
Thus, we use quest mechanism as a bridge between the bottom and top tiers.
The second advantage is to enhance the level of students’ persistence by social commitments. The quests are often
received from NPCs in the game world and it could, to some extent, be regarded as a process of negotiation between
students and NPCs. Therefore, we argue that receiving quests from NPCs engenders a form of social commitment,
which could enhance the intensity of goal-pursuing, especially in the sub-dimensions of effort and persistence, because
it is significantly related to keeping ones promises and expectancies of success. Moreover, attributions of success
(Weiner, 1985; 1992) and belief in ones efforts (Dweck, 2000) have substantial influences on learning, with the
implication that efforts to learning and attitudes towards persistence have benefits due to the enhancement of
convictions to do something. Thus, the social commitment to NPCs might be helpful of students, both for goalsetting
and for task-driven intensity.
In My-Pet-My-Quest, a quest consists of three elements: objectives, learning tasks, and rewards. An objective offers
students a clear goal; a learning task is the educational content of the quest; if students complete the learning task
successfully, they gain rewards. For solving math problems, for example, a quest may involve an award of
EduCoins, which are only awarded to those students who can master an arithmetic task by achieving more than 90%
correct responses. In other words, when students successfully complete the quests, they are rewarded with EduCoins,
which can be used to buy resources for the pets, such as pet food and goods.
Quests are conducted in a number of locales, such as a store, a forest, a tower, a temple, and an arena. The flow of game
quests delivered by NPCs in My-Pet-My-Quest is described as follows. First, an informer NPC appears at the door to
inform the student of new quests. The student can talk to the informer to obtain more detailed information, particularly
the location on the island where a quest NPC waits to escort him to the quest, as depicted in Figure 5. A student clicks the
button above an NPC, and the NPC tells him the content of the quest, including objective, learning tasks, and rewards.
After receiving the instructions, the student commences the quest.
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