Educational Games, Gamification, and Game Design - 21 Mart 2018

Games are a type of play and they have goals, rules, challenge, mechanics, fun, feedback, and outcome. And the type of games that kids are playing in these days have directed more towards digital devices than concrete objects. However, there are very few digital educational games that are suitable for kids in those devices. Some of the existing educational games are not even considered as “games” because they mostly offer gamified practices such as asking questions with multiple-choice answers and giving scores to the students according to their responses. In this study, the researcher designed “an educational game” with fun, goals, rules, feedback, outcome, challenge, and game mechanic. The game aims at teaching and practicing letter sounds for kindergarten students and/or first grade students.

For this aim, the researcher designed a quasi-experimental study with one control and one experimental group of students with 67 total number of students. Two schools are selected for this aim using the same curriculum within the same school chain, while one school is using their existing curriculum with the students, the experimental school will be using the digital educational game on iPad for a semester (20 weeks). The data were collected through performance test on letters and sounds, observation notes, and interviews with the students and teachers. The results showed that educational digital game had a positive effect on students learning letters and other results were shared with the participants of the presentation.