Games Based Learning Interest around the World

This blog is not an in depth piece of research, but should be of interest nonetheless. Basically, the data is derived from our Blogger stats. Our blog has had around 21,000 page views at the time of writing, so it provides a decent sample size.

Page Views via Country

Entry	Page views
United States	5935
France	3417
United Kingdom	3376
China	1000
Ukraine	880
Germany	856
India	566
Australia	378
Russia	266
Canada	221

We have promoted our blog in the UK and USA through links to other bloggers and some of the page views are from these sources.  An analysis of referring sites indicates some key sites that we have nurtured relationships with or where we have posted about our blog. This shows that traffic is not purely organic.  For example GetIdeas.org, Linkedin, and Kings School * account for around 450 page views. Some of the views are also driven from our corporate sites (www.games-ed.co.uk and www.pixelfountain.co.uk).

Blogger map of our page views

Even though search engines and Twitter account for the majority of views, we would have expected a slight skewing of the results to the UK and US because of the promotional activities stated above. This might impact on the results shown in the table, but deducting a few hundred off the UK and US would not change the order. These are countries that are clearly interested in games based learning.  The French result is particularly impressive - note we have not nurtured any French link ups, so that traffic is all organic. The Ukraine and Russian results are hard to decipher as the source sites can be obscure.

Our blog is written in English, which is likely to skew the results. Taking that into account, can we put forward any reason for our results?  Possibly, an enthusiasm for entertainment games is the key to the interest in games based learning. A proxy for this enthusiasm can perhaps be seen in the number of games companies in a particular country. Looking at the contractor list on Gamasutra website shows a reasonable correlation with our page views, although again France is somewhat of an anomaly.

If anyone has any other ideas, we would love to read your comments. Finally, I wonder if other bloggers out there could share their data and we could do a meta-analysis. Wow, that would almost be like proper research.

* We wrote a case study of their use of our games-ED product on the blog, which the school’s site links to.

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