Open and Cultural Data Games for Learning

Educators often seek ways to introduce gaming in the classroom in order to break the usual teaching routine, expand the usual course curriculum with additional knowledge, but mostly as a means to motivate students and increase their engagement with the course content. Even though the vast majority of students find gaming to be appealing and a welcome change to the usual teaching practice, many educators and parents doubt their educational value; in this paper, we discuss a card game designed to teach environmental matters to early elementary school students, using open data. We present a comparative study of how the game increased the students' interest for the subject, as well as their performance and engagement to the course, compared with conventional teaching and a Prezi presentation used to teach the same content to other student groups.