Teaching Earthquake-Resistant Design Through a Serious Game and an Interactive Environment

Serious games and interactive multimedia are widely used in instruction, yet two questions remain comparatively under-answered: whether the learning gains they produce endure beyond immediate post-testing and how they perform on technical, spatial subject matter. This study designed and evaluated an integrated digital learning package pairing an interactive multimedia environment, which delivers theory, with a purpose-built three-dimensional serious game, in which learners assemble the load-bearing system of a building so that abstract structural principles become spatial decisions. Both components were grounded in the Revised Bloom Taxonomy and the Werbach and Hunter gamification framework, and their usability was appraised by expert panels before deployment. The package was tested against conventional instruction in a pre-test, post-test, and retention control-group experiment with forty third-year architecture students in Türkiye, randomly assigned to the two conditions and matched on content, contact time, and instructor. Knowledge of earthquake-resistant design was measured with a twenty-five-item expert-validated test before instruction, one week after, and eight weeks later. The groups were equivalent at baseline. The experimental group scored substantially higher at post-test (62.2 versus 49.6; Cohen’s d = 1.41), an advantage confirmed by an analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) adjusting for the pre-test and by a group by time interaction, and remained higher at the eight-week retention test (57.8 versus 43.4; Cohen’s d = 1.71), although the between-group difference in knowledge loss was not significant. The findings provide controlled evidence that pairing an interactive environment with a content-aligned serious game can produce large and durable learning gains on technical, spatial content.