The didactic game method is much more active than the traditional approach to teaching based on talking and explanation methods, because it requires students to participate, to be fully active, and at the same time makes learning unconscious. In addition to its verifiable subject curriculum based educational objectives, the didactic game also has other educational objectives, as it encourages cooperation, solving conflicts, acceptance of criticism and the development of various life competences (e. g. persistence, mutual help, etc.). Despite the knowledge of the advantages of the didactic game method, there is still a lack of didactic games for the topics covered in the Science and Technology curriculum.
Therefore, we decided to do a research for our Master's thesis. We have developed three didactic games for learning about electricity and magnetism in the 4th grade. The aim of the research was to find out to what extent students can achieve the educational objectives for the topics of electricity and magnetism with three different didactic games, which competences the didactic games encourage and what opinion both students and the teacher have about them.
Fifteen students participated in the research. Students’ data were collected via a knowledge exam and a paper-and-pencil questionnaire. Teacher’s data, however, via a semi-structured interview. All students played all three didactic games. They took a knowledge exam before playing the didactic games and again after playing them. This was done to see if the students had gained new knowledge on this topic. Student questionnaires were developed to find out what students thought about the didactic games: what was good, what needed to be changed or improved, and what competences the game encouraged. A semi-structured interview was carried out with the teacher. The purpose of the interview was to find out her opinion on didactic games, what they should be like to be appropriate, high quality, to what extent she uses didactic games and whether she thought our didactic games were appropriate, high quality and what could be possible improvements.
The results of the research show that the didactic game teaching method is suitable for teaching the electricity and magnetism and that students enjoy learning in this way. The teacher also pointed out didactic games as a motivational tool for students, which activates them and unconsciously enables them to achieve the learning objectives. Other elements of didactic games that make a didactic game high quality, interesting, fun and educational were also mentioned: aesthetics, comprehensibility of the instructions and adaptation of the didactic game to both the learning content and the students.
The results of the master's thesis will help teachers to gain new insights/ways of teaching the topic of electricity and magnetism in the 4th grade, which will trigger activity, interest, participation and the development of different competences in the students.
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