Student’s habits and preferences in digital game : a case of designing an educational game for primary schools student

The embedded technology in learning for primary school students is seen as a paradigm shift in education. However, in developing countries, technology is more actively utilised in higher education and secondary schools rather than primary school. Digital game, on the other hand, is much preferred by primary school students after their school time. Educational games or even entertainment games can be found online or in the market, however, most of the designs are not user centric. This paper will further discuss the initial study phase which was done to; (1) identify student’s habits towards digital game usage; (2) identify digital game design preferences by students and; (3) purposive sampling findings. This investigation is to identify interested and capable students in engaging future digital game design activities. In order to further investigateon students’ habits and game design preferences, we will use the first phase of PDEduGame framework process. Hence, a preliminary investigation was done with 287 primary school students aged 10 to 11 years old. The Islamic Religious Primary School (KAFA) in Selangor District was selected for this investigation purposes. The next part of this study is the elaboration on the methodology used during the investigation. Some teachers were interviewed to support the investigation. The results from the investigation will be further discussed and elaborated in the descriptively. Finally, from the results, we suggest the input generated for the initial study stage for the second stage of the participatory design framework process

Changing the way we build games: a design-based research study examining the implementation of homemade powerpoint games in the classroom

This design-based research study examined the effects of a game design project on student test performance, with refinements made to the implementation after each of the three iterations of the study. The changes to the implementation over the three iterations were based on the literature for the three justifications for the use of homemade PowerPoint games in the classroom: constructionism, microthemes, and question writing. A review of the literature for the justifications found that the game project, as implemented in previous studies using homemade PowerPoint games, did not align well with the justifications. After three iterations of the study, students who created homemade PowerPoint games did perform better on assessments than students who either did not create games, created games as a review, or created games as part of an unstructured unit project. However, these differences were not statistically significant. As part of the third iteration, two of the individual justifications were tested in isolation to whether gains could be seen without creating games. While the students who were part of interventions involving microthemes and question writing did perform better than students who did not receive the interventions, the differences were not statistically significant. Future research in the area of game design as an instructional tool should look to replicate these studies, as some of the sample sizes were small. Future research should also examine additional changes to the implementation of a game design project, including the use of other programming languages