Abstract:

In recent years, game-based digital learning platform go deep into various schools. For example, "Jun-yi Academy", is widely used. However, the primary schools in the rural area where they are short of funds and lack of IT equipment, the students couldn't enjoy the advantages brought by the Technology and the digital resources on the Net. Teachers from the elementary schools in the rural area came to us. They want to know whether or not we could help them to take advantages of games with our expertise in learning technology because they are facing some teaching bottleneck in dealing with the younger students, who are interested in playing games. In order to help them get the problem solved, we have started to investigate the issue by visiting the rural primary school in Taiwan as our longitudinal case study since 2017.

Thus for this case study, we conducted our research work in two phases. In the first, we wanted to understand the actual status of their instruction and learning practices at the school by observing the school and interviewing the teachers in the hope to identify their problem. In the second, we hope, based on their affordable situation, to present our proposal on a specific board game that we are designing to tailor to their needs.

In first phase, we found that the school doesn't have efficient IT equipment in the classroom. They only have the government-supported classroom computer and electronic whiteboard. Also, from our interview with the teachers, they indicate that they are interested in integrating games to raise students’ motivation, but they don't want to change the rhythm of teaching. After a week of classroom observations, we could conclude our finding as follows: firstly, most of the teachers have used to their own teaching method and behaviors, and resist to change their teaching method; secondly, they are short of the IT equipment to support their new ways of teaching. Thus implementation of digital learning has become impossible; thirdly, a number of educational board games have been placed in the classroom but students don't like to play.

In second phase, we are trying to propose a board game called, "Adventure of Classroom, AoC’, similar to the experiences of playing the digital-game learning. However, we put more emphasis on the exchange between the players in the real world. Significantly, the cost of the board game, compared to the digital games, is very low. By playing this AoC game, teachers can make the whole classroom as a stage, while teaching the courses. The teacher can take the “Challenge” and “Mission” methods to stimulate students’ enthusiasm for learning without changing his or her teaching rhythm, while the students could play a variety of "career" roles, through the point-earning incentive mechanism for doing cooperative learning, competition and some other ways to stimulate students ' motivation for learning and meanwhile enjoying the fun. Eventually, we anticipate that the schools in the rural areas, lack of IT equipment, can also take advantages of board games to raise students learning motivations. Currently we are developing the AoC with the collaboration of the targeted school and exploring the teachers' views on the feasibility of incorporating AoC into their learning settings. We look forward to being able to use AoC to form an innovative and interesting learning environment that will be able to shorten the digital gap in learning and teaching between the rural and urban.

Keywords:

Game-based learning, Learning environment, Game design.