Applications of educational serious games for information technology related subjects in higher education

Serious games which are designed for purposes rather than pure entertainment have become one of the popular topics these days as they have the potential to be effective and efficient teaching tools which are interactive, attractive and immersive. This study conducts a systematic literature review on the past research on the application of educational serious games in Information Technology (IT) related subjects in tertiary sector, and aims at broadening our understanding of the role of games in education. Herewith, we searched the selected keywords on several academic databases and found an initial set of 3437 studies. Then we excluded papers on the basis of their title, abstract and full text to come up with a set of more relevant studies. This paper proposes a new classification for applied games in this area and classifies them into five categories of simulation games, puzzle-solving games, 3D games, board games, and role-playing games. The results of the data analysis show that majority of the studies have used simulation and role-playing games. A summary of the results and conclusions of each paper is also provided to inform both teachers and researchers on the topic.