Abstract:

Over recent years, there has been an explosive growth of interest in education reform in Thailand based on STEM education. The concept of STEM is referred to the real world problem solving process based on the integration of the 4 basic knowledge: Science; Technology; Engineering and Mathematics. With this concept, this study presents the case study of how to handle the diversity of the students in the birdwatch course in the Faculty of Science. The system has been designed for the students who enrolled in this course which may come from any majors e.g., computer science, general science, and applied statistics. Therefore, the major benefit of the system in the STEM concept is how to gather the diversity of the students and promote them to generate their own knowledges based on their prior-experiences and specializations. By gathering the knowledge of bird features (Science subject) together with the computer programming skill (Technology subject), the students can share their ideas, create discussion and foster greater understanding. The major contributions of this study are the RPG (Role Playing Game), and the repertory grid mind tool. In the game-based learning basis, student can play the computer game to have some fun and gains the knowledge at the same time. RPG is a game in which players assume the roles of characters correspond to the story telling of the game. Players take responsibility for acting out their roles within a narrative, either through literal acting or through a process of structured decision-making or character development. By following the rules and guidelines, the players would pass each stage by collecting their items (such as mana, potion, weapon, and etc.) and use these items to beat the boss in each stage. The repertory grid method is used to serve as a collaborative knowledge construction tool of a game-based learning activity. A repertory grid can be viewed as the construction of rows and columns, where columns represent the learning elements which are needed to construct and rows represent the necessary features correspond to the learning elements. The repertory grid method originally itself is a well-known knowledge engineering approach for constructing knowledge from their personal backgrounds. In brief, this study aims to develop the RPG with the embedded mind tool to facilitate the students to share and construct what they have learned during the game playing process. Following the story-line of the game, two students can share their knowledges to develop and modify the repertory grid via a shared interface. To evaluate the effectiveness of this study, the game will be implemented in the bird-watch course in the Faculty of Science in order to promote the students’ ability in terms of their learning attitudes and motivation.

Keywords:

Repertory grid method, game-based learning, knowledge construction.