Contribution of Motivational Orientations to Student Outcomes in a Discovery-Based Program of Game Design Learning

This paper explored relationships between middle school and high school teams of students' motivational orientation and team outcomes in a guided discovery-based context in which students learned while designing web games. Teams of students with greater initial intrinsic motivation or a greater increase in intrinsic motivation during the activity had higher programming scores. Wiki activity contributed to outcomes. Age was negatively associated with outcomes indicating possibly the program is more conducive to middle school students. Findings contribute to scholarly debates on incompatibilities between discovery learning due to cognitive load, and self-determination theory