Abstract:

The greatest strength of using e-books lies in breaking down the time and space restriction and providing learners, especially students, with more opportunities to learn with greater spontaneity. In comparison with the traditional books, e-books can provide students of elementary and secondary education with increased resources, and in turn promote their learning effectiveness and outcome. In this work, in order to make the use of e-books more appealing to students from different ages; we have enriched them with multimedia educational games. During the development of the games, which were specifically designed to be placed in books of sciences from elementary to secondary education in Greece, we have applied and followed specific characteristics such as rules, goals and objectives, outcomes and feedback, conflict (and/or competition, challenge, opposition), interaction, and even representation of story.
A series of multimedia educational games were manufactured addressed at students of different ages that served specific educational goals; in this paper three indicative ones will be presented. Specifically, for the elementary education (5th grade) we have built an educational game called “RECYCLING KEEP OUR FORESTS CLEAN”, which is a stimulation based game. Students in this game can keep clean forests by throwing garbage’s in the “proper kind of bin”. For the secondary education (9th grade) we have constructed the games entitled “THE HOUSE OF SILICON” and “THE ROOM OF CARBON”. In “THE HOUSE OF SILICON” the student is able to “walk” around the rooms with the help of the arrows of the keyboard. Each room contains concrete uses of silicon, describes characteristics of silicon and the student/player is called to find out which are true and which are false. Also a score is recorded and in the case that the student answers wrong, the correct one is shown to him/her. In “THE ROOM OF CARBON” by proper use of the arrows of the keyboard the student/player can walk around the space, trying to avoid silicon and other obstacles and catch the “words/concepts”, which are relevant to the carbon element. Simultaneously, the playing time is recorded and the true or false concepts are recorded in two nearby boards.
Multimedia educational games can capitalize on students’ enthusiasm about electronic games and serve as a motivation for their learning as well as serve as a medium for capturing students’ interest in specific science concepts. There were designed as fun activities through which students can involve, learn, understand and in some cases even practice the knowledge that they have obtained, which is a crucial step in the education. Moreover we have constructed games based upon concepts which are normally difficult to comprehend and often cause misconceptions to students. Future detailed work will be conducted in order to demonstrate that multimedia educational games on e - books can be used by the teacher as an effective supplementary didactical tool for teaching science.

Keywords:

Multimedia educational games, science, primary and secondary education, e-books.