Abstract:

Games have an important role in children’s life, play is essential for their optimal development. Games can be used in the classroom, as they promote active participation, facilitate learning and exercising different skills, form a positive experience of learning. Game based learning (GBL) is a teaching approach that helps students learn new content or skills or exercise old ones thought different aspects of a game.

A complex questionnaire related with GBL and gamification was developed with four sections. For this paper the section related with the implementation of GBL was chosen to be studied. In this research 17 items are analyzed, from which 10 are demographical and 7 are related with the research topic. All the items are formulated as closed questions of different type: multiple choice, checkbox, and scale. Respondents are 186 primary school teachers with an average age of 41.18 years and with an average teaching experience of 20, almost all of them female.

Analyzing the obtained data, we concluded that three fourth of the respondents using GBL very often or often. The school subjects where games are more frequently used are Mother Language, Mathematics, and Games and movement. Teachers use games for arouse pupils’ interest for the subject of the lesson (more than three quarter of the respondents), repeat and practice the acquired knowledge and competencies (more than half of the respondents). Games are usually used in small groups or in frontal activities. The most popular type of games are those of motion games, used by three quarter of the respondents. Games which don’t require any tools respectively role play and drama games are also popular, almost half of the respondents use them. Board-games and card-games are not so frequently used, less than one fifth of the respondents integrate them in their teaching. The main difficulties experienced by the participants are time and space limits. GBL is very time consuming and special class management are required for it. The space limit could be in relation with the fact that the most popular games are motion games.

Keywords:

Game based learning, primary school, primary school teacher.