An Approach to Design Educational Digital Game to Improve Students’ Conceptual Development in Physics of Static Electricity

Abstract

Nowadays, students are very familiar with digital games. So, it would be nice if we put the knowledge into the digital game. For developing educational digital games, the games do not raise and contain all the content, but it just delivers core or essential concepts for learning. In this paper, we present a developmental approach to design educational digital game and then discuss how to design digital game for learning with regarding learners’ existing understanding of scientific concepts. For the proposed approach, we need to investigate student’ initial conceptions on particular target of science concepts, and this study involved 74 eleventh-grade students, age ranging from 16 to 18 years old, in this first step. To explore their prior conceptions, selected items of the Three Tier Diagnostic Static Electricity Test (TTDSET) focusing the concept of electric charge, electrostatic force, electric field, energy and electric potential, and capacitor. The result showed that vast majority student hold misconceptions on the target scientific concepts about static electricity. After that, the second step is design of digital game for learning emphasizing the elimination of their misconceptions. As such, the proposed digital game, named “Electrilism War”, has been designed to not only transform the core scientific concepts into challenge and fun scenario, but also simplify the concept and connect everyday life action to the game. In addition, the game has been designed using role-playing game style with a story of fantasy novels. We believed that this developmental approach would particularly affect a process of conceptual change using the context of digital game-based learning.