Games for Teaching and Learning History: a Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

This work shows a systematic literature review carried out within Scopus database to identify educational projects where games have been used to teach geography and history in secondary education. Following most of PRISMA methodology procedures, while adapting some of its protocols, we identified 255 works. After the first data cleaning, we applied our inclusion and exclusion criteria to end up with 125 relevant results which were refined in later stages. Within our final sample, we applied descriptive statistics to confirm that most projects appear in conference proceedings and that they use mainly educational games created ad hoc instead of commercial games. Many times, these projects have not been implemented and even in these cases, their educational impact is rarely measured rigorously.