Desirable Difficulties? The Effects of Spaced and Interleaved Practice in an Educational Game

Educational games benefit from incorporating evidence-based learning principles. Most of these principles have been studied in conventional learning settings, and their applicability and possible benefits to games is unclear. Two such principles within the general framework of Desirable Difficulties are Spacing and Interleaving. Both refer to the idea of distributed practice over time (as opposed to blocked), with interleaving having the added benefit of presenting opportunities for comparison across stimuli. We designed a digital game on the topic of multiplication facts that implemented three possible sequencing of problems – blocked, spaced, and interleaved. One hundred and fifty elementary school students were randomly assigned to one of the conditions. In-game learning curve analysis of logs found that blocked presentation improves in-game performance. However, out-of-game tests found that interleaved presentation improves out-of-game performance efficiency. This work demonstrates the applicability and benefits of incorporating evidence-based principles into digital games.