The effects of mini-games on students' confidence and performance in mental calculation

Low confidence toward mathematics is one of the critical issues that diminish students' will to learn mathematics. Several studies indicated that game-based learning (GBL) might be a potential approach to address this issue. In addition, mental calculation, a fundamental mathematical skill, was considered to be a potential skill that may build students' confidence toward mathematics. Thus, this study attempted to promote students' mathematical confidence by incorporating mini-games, a sub-genre of games, into mental calculation learning. A preliminary study was conducted to investigate how students reacted to learn mental calculation in a mini-game environment. The results of the preliminary study suggested that the mini-game-based approach was popular to students. However, it was observed that students' with different levels of academic ability might benefit diversely from the mini-game environment. Thus, an experiment was conducted to investigate how students with different levels of academic ability react to learn mental calculation with mini-games, in terms of two important aspects of learning, i.e., performance and confidence. A control group participated in a paper-based learning approach to provide a baseline of comparison. The results indicated that The mini-games helped both high- and low-ability students gain significant improvement on their mathematical confidence. In addition, the low-ability students learned with mini-games gained more improvement on mental calculation than their paper-based peers did.