ICCE 2025 Subconference on

Game-based learning, playful learning, and gamification have gained attention for practitioners and become well-known research areas around the world. Learning fostered by games and toys is one of the most exciting and fascinating research areas in 21st century education. When learners interact with games and toys, they explore worlds, encounter difficulties, and make decisions, which can make them feel emotionally engaged in the process of learning. Furthermore, they learn how to solve problems and develop creative thinking. In a sense, games and toys can be a good vehicle for learning that encourages inquiry, knowledge production, global citizenship, and creativity.

As a research community, we are driven by questions pertinent to how games can be designed to foster intrinsic motivation, to restructure thinking, to alter discourse patterns, to transform classroom-learning practices and to reform a teacher-centric learning culture. We are looking for the marriage of learning theories, technologies, humanistic design, and practices. We seek research that reveals the results and processes of the above. In the era of big data, we are looking for research that sheds light on how students’ activity and performance can be documented for the purpose of learning and teaching via games or plays. We are eager to unpack the learning processes involving the use of toys, games, and game-like activities with or without digital technologies. Any other topics about games, toys, and education are also welcome.

This sub-conference aims at providing researchers a platform to share and discuss innovative and advanced design, learning, and assessment technologies utilizing toys, games, and gamification. It welcomes submissions in topics including, but not limited to:

• Advanced learning technologies (e.g., artificial intelligence, personalization, adaptive system, cross-platform gaming mechanism, augmented reality, etc.)

• Ethical issues of AI in game-based learning

• Applying learning analytics in game-based learning

• Big data applied to learning with games or gamification

• Case studies and exemplars of game-based learning

• Collaborative and community-based learning in game-based learning

• Comparison of learning with games vs traditional schooling

• Design of learning activities pertinent to the concept of games

• Effectiveness and processes of learning with games and toys

• Empirical and formal evaluations

• Enactment of game-based learning in informal and formal settings

• Engagement, emotion, and affect

• Entertainment robots and digital toys for education

• Game and toy use in classrooms

• Game attitude and perception

• Game narrative design

• Game-based learning teacher professional development

• Games that foster higher-order thinking skills (problem-solving skills, creativity, etc.)

• Gamification

• Identity and role-play

• Immersive learning

• Interaction techniques for learning with games and toys

• Interface design

• Learning foundations and design theory around games and toys

• Location-based games and ubiquitous technologies

• Metaverse

• Mobile, casual, and online games

• Multiplayer and social games

• Multi-sensory interfaces

• Natural user interface

• Naturalistic studies

• Pedagogy informed by games and learning

• Play and enactment

• Physical interactions and embodiment through games and toys

• Simulation and animation

• Social and cultural dimensions of learning

• STEM education

• Sustainable and scalable cases of learning with games

• Theories on learning with games in general

• Use of social media

• Virtual world (characters, avatar representations, etc.)

• Virtual storytelling

• Wii-like somatic forms of learning, including in sports and training contexts

We welcome contributions that report on accomplished research as well as work in progress.