Abstract:

Playing board-games is fun for both children and adults. But it is not only a joyful activity, it also develops different skills of the player, as communication skills, strategy creating, problem solving competency, cooperation, etc. Nowadays there are many board-games on sale, active board-game playing communities organize events, and a culture of playing board-games is developing. Thus integrating board-games in educational activities seems to be a natural process to follow. But this integration has many obstacles, as time and curriculum constrains, the lack of methodological knowledge of the teachers, inadequate choose of educational board-games for some subjects, etc.
The aim of our research is to study primary school teachers’ attitude towards integrating board-games in teaching, the advantages they see, and the obstacles they experience. For this purpose a questionnaire was developed by the authors with 23 questions, both closed and open questions.
The results show that a high percentage of the respondents use board-games in classroom, about half of them on a weekly bases. Most of the games used are developed for educational purposes. Mathematics is the discipline with the most extensive use of board-games, followed by Hungarian and Romanian language. Board-games are more frequently used for exercising skills or repeating knowledge. Usually they allow 16-30 minutes to play the game on a lesson. Teachers see many advantages of playing board-games, like it is fun, it facilitate learning, it develops the problem solving competence and the strategical-logical thinking, it develops cooperation skills and acts as team-building activity, etc. Only some respondents gave also some disadvantages, as it could be not so fun for pupils with low level competencies. The list of advantages given by the respondents is way longer than the list of disadvantages. Teacher also aware about the obstacles of using board-games, as time and curriculum constrains, class-management problems.
The research has two main limitations. Analyzing the examples given by the respondents, not all of them are board-games, so for some of them the notion board-game is not well-defined. Also, the questionnaire was voluntarily filled in, and there is a higher chance to be filled by someone who is interested in board-games.

Keywords:

Board-game, primary school, in-service teachers.