Sufficiency Economy Philosophy-Based Mobile Game Application to Promoting Sustainability Understanding based on Inquiry Learning with Everyday Life Activities

Abstract

His Majesty King Bhumibol Adulyadej’s Sufficiency Economy Philosophy (SEP) has been named as a way of life for sustainability. In Thailand, SEP has been included in the basic education core curriculum to learn about efficiency life, reasonably and meticulous. However, the teaching of SEP only focuses on memorization with a limited example, resulting in students’ poor understanding and are unable to apply to their daily lives. With the advantages of mobile devices, this study developed a mobile game application to address such learning flaws and enhance the understanding of sustainability through the game missions of everyday life activities. The mini game stories were carefully designed with the scenarios, situations, and missions in corresponding with SEP pillars of moderation, reasonableness, and protection. Students play and learn the topic by following the inquiry-based learning approach. In addition, a quasi-experiment was conducted with primary school students in Social Study course to investigate the effectiveness, perceptions and cognitive loads of the developed game application. The findings reveal that the students who learned with the proposed game could outperform than those who learn with the traditional e-learning with no interactive activities; meanwhile, it found that those who got the high achievements performed well during the learning process with the shorter time on the developed game. Furthermore, the high achievers reveal better perceptions towards the game than the students with low success and felt not difficult to experience this new learning platform. In other words, this developed mobile game is helpful for students to improve their understanding of sustainability for efficiency life and society.