About this Research Topic

Background

Addressing the challenges of contemporary societies requires a series of special efforts in different directions, particularly toward positive social changes. This requires developing an open-minded approach, together with tools that are useful to people to understand and deal with the inevitable complexities of our reality. These tools are mainly (but not only) related to the deployment of a scientific culture and to the basic comprehension of the language of Science. More importantly, the development of prosocial behaviors and attitudes is indispensable. Prosocial behaviors are fundamental aspects of human decision-making that significantly affect both individuals and society. According to Nowak (2006), a society's overall sustainability greatly depends on its members' prosocial attitudes, experience, and aptitude in terms of social dimensions (Pratt and Jeffcutt, 2009). Given that acquiring preferences for prosocial behaviors and internalizing social norms occur mostly throughout childhood (House and Tomasello, 2018; House et al., 2020), it becomes crucial to provide opportunities for young children to develop such preferences. Indeed, childhood and adolescence are the natural starting point for life-long learning.

Game-based educational methods were implemented in recent years to promote open-mindedness and prosociality in youngsters. In particular, the use of organized games and the interactions that result from group play make game-based learning programs a natural tool for fostering desirable behaviors. Moreover, when games are introduced in a family environment, the repeated interaction between players can lead adults to be part of the process and improve positive behaviors too. Indeed, games often require players to follow defined rules and coordination among players, including cooperative actions and the ability to resolve problems peacefully. Nevertheless, games are not substitutes for other forms of educational methods. They must be well-organized and integrated with traditional teaching for their potential to be useful to the scope. Thus, assessing how organized educational programs, repeated games activities and the use of any kind of game (from digital to analog) can foster open-mindedness and prosocial behaviors, is one of the main concerns when implementing policy-related programs, which connect game-based learning to social conscience.

The main aim of this Research Topic is to collect empirical studies to better understand how game-based educational programs positively impact on young adults and also their families, prosocial behaviors and open-mindedness approaches. In particular, we are interested in which kind of game-based educational activities or which (digital or analog) game mechanisms are preferred to foster social changes in behaviors.

We welcome contributions from researchers in any area, especially those using games as an educational and social change tool, and closely examine their impact on prosocial behaviors and open-mindedness attitude. Possible areas of contributions that can be addressed, but are not limited to, are:

• evaluate how game-based educational programs can affect prosocial behaviors
• are games useful to learn and improve social norms?
• game-based learning for the development and diffusion of scientific culture and approaches
• the roles of game mechanisms in fostering positive related behaviors
• design game-based educational programs for learning and well-being purpose and evaluate how they can be used in teaching
• the role of repeated games activities in the family setting to learn.

Keywords: education, prosociality, open-mindedness, scientific culture, game-based learning

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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