MEDULLA

This article explores the design and instructional effectiveness of Medulla, an educational game meant to teach brain structure and function to undergraduate psychology students. Developed in the retro-style platformer genre, Medulla uses two-dimensional gameplay with pixel-based graphics to engage students in
learning content related to the brain, information which is often pre-requisite to more rigorous psychological study. A pretest-posttest design was used in an experiment assessing Medulla’s ability to teach psychology content. Results indicated content knowledge was significantly higher on the posttest than the pretest, with a large effect size. Medulla appears to be an effective learning tool. These results have important  implications in the design of educational psychology games and for educational game designers and artists exploring the possibility of using a two-dimensional retro-style structure.