Development of a Digital Citizenship Computer Game with a Contextual Decision-Making-Oriented Approach

Worldwide counties foster good digital citizenship practices as a priority for students to be safe and responsible with technology use at an earlier age. With the advancement of computer and communication technologies, a computer game has been recognized to enable students' learning performance. However, situating students in meaningful computer game-based learning activities remains to be settled, especially for digital citizenship. In this study, a computer game with a contextual decision-making-oriented approach has been developed to support digital citizenship practices. An experiment was conducted on secondary school students to evaluate the effects of the proposed game on digital citizenship practices and learning motivation by comparing with the conventional learning approach. Interestingly, the experimental results indicated that the proposed game effectively reduced students' anxiety and promoted self-efficacy. Furthermore, it is also found that the proposed game benefited the males more than females in the term of learning motivations. This suggests the need to provide additional support to females' motivation in the further improvement of the proposed game.