Teaching with serious games is increasingly a response to the challenges of pupil education. The present research was conducted over the 2009-2010 school year. This study focused, on the one hand, on self-esteem and intrinsic motivation because these correlation strongly with good results at school, and, on the other hand, on gender, because it has an effect on self-esteem and intrinsic motivation. The aim is to measure the variation of self-esteem and knowledge, for thirty-two boys and girls, ten or eleven years old, after using video games for ten hours. The Coopersmith Self-Esteem Inventory (SEI) has been used both before and after the experiment, to measure the children’s self-esteem. Learning increase has been measured using questionnaires. The results show an effect on self-esteem, with a greater one for boys than for girls. The effectiveness of the proposed serious game, which deals with History and Art History, was measured and pupils learned a great deal. A gender is seen to have an effect on both self-esteem and knowledge.

Adolescence, 2012, 30, 1, 133-143.