Plastic Island Game: A Digital Game for Facilitating Citizen Inquiry Pedagogy in School Science Education

Abstract

Promoting essential skills to fulfill 21st-century learning goals is undeniable. Using contextual issues as the topic for learning and citizen inquiry as a pedagogy can be considered an alternative approach for students learning in science to achieve their goals. In addition, active learning in a contextual issue, such as the environment, will give students benefits for meaningful learning. However, few technologies supported citizen inquiry learning with specific topics are available. Hence, developing technology for supporting citizen inquiry is beneficial for students and teachers. In designing the game, the researchers must focus on inquiry steps and involve socio- scientific issues to achieve meaningful learning. This paper focuses on implementing a digital game as technology to support citizen inquiry which aims to evaluate the game quality and assess pre-service science teachers’ motivation and self-efficacy toward implementing citizen inquiry. Based on the results, the quality of the game categorizes as good, and pre-service teachers’ motivation shows that intrinsic motivation outnumbers extrinsic motivation. At the same time, pre-service teachers’ selfefficacy shows a good result, with mean scores exceeding three on a scale of 1 to 5. The findings imply that digital game technology can be used in teacher professional development, especially to train teachers or pre-service teachers in the inquiry or citizen inquiry context.