EFFECTIVENESS OF FREE & OPEN SOURCE TOOLS TO ENHANCE GAME BASED LEARNING EXPERIENCE IN SCHOOL EDUCATION

The education technology is one of the primary application areas of Multimedia in Education. Several e-learning solutions is being adopted around the globe, to provide a better and enhanced learning experience to the students of current generation. One of the most effective ways of such technology enhanced education system is Game Based Learning. This type of learning is a part of active learning, where involvement of students in the class by means of various interactive activities plays a vital role. The authors have conducted a detailed survey on such methodology in some schools of Oman. Apart from surveys, authors have also conducted interviews among the faculty members of such schools, where game based learning is adopted. The feedback from faculty and students have proved that this method is very effective in enhancing learning experience. But when the requirement analysis was done, it was found that, many educational institutions are stepping back from such implementation just because of complexity involved in adopting such technology. Such complexities include funding, to provide necessary training to the staff members for developing such content, and moreover, development of such e-learning support material also requires lots of efforts apart from time. Authors have studied various advantages of implementing Free and Open source software tools to develop such content. As a pilot project authors have used one of the free and open source tools, Scratch, which is developed at MIT. Some educational games were developed for children of age group 7 to 10 years. Later these games were published in MIT community online to share with everyone. After implementation, feedback was collected from the students, parents, and the faculty members of the school. The result shows that such tools could be learned by anyone with basic knowledge of computers and game making could be very easy process if we want to use it especially for basic level of education. Many laboratory experiments along with complex scientific processes can also be explained with an ease by means of interactive games, which can be developed in-house. As the tools involved are free and open source, it gives better options for customization which in turn is a good sign of sustainable development in education sector.