LEARNING CELL CYCLE VIA A GAME-BASED LEARNING

Cell cycle is one of the essential topics included in cell biology where orderly sequence of events takes place inside a cell leading to its growth and division. With various terminology included and concepts in microscopic level, it makes students difficult to understand. Many science educators have come up with different teaching strategies to minimize the learning difficulties in the topic, such as dancing mitosis, computer game, constructing cell cycle in 3D, stop motion animation and analogy. However most of these strategies fail to make student visualize sequential events taking place during cell cycle.

This study thus aimed:
(1) to develop a game-based learning to teach cell cycle and
(2) to study the effectiveness of a game-based learning in promoting conceptual understanding of cell cycle.

A game-based learning entitled “GAD”, which stands for Game-Analogy-Debriefing, had been firstly designed with the objective to make student understand and visualize the sequential events taking place in the cell during cell cycle. Before starting the game, students were first given an analogy of opening a new shop. They were asked to go through 8 steps (analogue to 8 steps in cell cycle) within a challenging of three minutes completion. They then invited to play a giant board game. An original idea of a game in this study is from a monopoly game. At the beginning, each 5-member team had extra minerals/resources necessary for a cell to undergo cell cycle. One member of each team or a player acted as a cell. The player moved along 60 × 30 centimeter square boards with the same spaces as numbers indicated by the dice. Each square board explained an event occurring in each step of cell cycle. When a player reached a particular station, he/she had to demonstrate event with the provided materials. The winner of the game would be the one who could finish the cycle at G0 point. Finally carousel activity was used to carry the discussion in the whole class and concluded with video clip at the end. To determine the effectiveness of a game-based learning unit, a total of 25 grade 10 Bhutanese students (12 male and 13 female) had participated in the implementation. They took pre- and posttest (12 multiple choice questions and 3 open-ended questions) before- and after the intervention. Data from worksheets gathering in the class and semi-structured interview were also used to support the effectiveness of a learning unit. The test results showed that an average score from posttest is significantly higher than pretest (p<0.05). Data from worksheet and interview also support the findings. The interview results showed that students had good understanding of cell cycle as all six students who were interviewed could correctly sequence the given diagrams of cell’s phases together with a proper explanation of events in each phases. These findings concluded that the game based learning-GAD has shown significant enhancement of student’s conceptual understanding. Unfortunately, some students reflected that the game took long time, only few students could act as cell and little bit confused during demonstration part. However these could be taken as suggestions for further improvement on the study.