The effect of intelligence games and traditional children's games on attention and visual perception in secondary school students

This study aims to investigate the effects of intelligence and traditional children's games on the attention and visual perception levels of secondary school students. In the study, the quasi-experimental (pretest-posttest) model with control group and purposive sampling method were used. The study was conducted in the 2021-2022 academic year with a total of 80 students studying at Sivas Merkez Süleyman Demirel Secondary School. The participants were categorized as traditional children's games group (n=20), intelligence games group (n=20), both traditional children's games and intelligence games group (n=20) and the control group (n=20). The traditional children's games including hopscotch, dodgeball, handkerchief snatch and tombik were presented to the experimental groups. Games including chess, checkers, gray walnut and mangala games were implemented as the intelligent games. The data collection tools consisted of personal information form prepared by the researcher, developmental visual perception test by Dağ and Memiş (2019) and d2 attention test adapted from Yaycı (2013). The intelligence and traditional children's games specified for the experimental groups were played once a week for 2 hours for 12 weeks. In the analysis of the data, arithmetic mean, frequency, standard deviation and correlation descriptive analyzes were applied drawing on the SPPS program. Kruskal Wallis Test, Wilcoxon signed-row test was utilized to compare pretest-posttest and difference scores according to groups, and Mann-Whitney U Test was used to compare visual perception and d2 attention test scores according to variables .05. According to findings, attention and visual perception difference scores significantly improved in all groups. It was revealed that this difference was in favor of the experimental group playing traditional children's games in both attention and visual perception development levels between the groups. It was observed that there was no significant difference according to the variables of gender and being a sports branch. In conclusion, the findings obtained seem to suggest that traditional children's games and intelligence games can serve a useful purpose as an educational tool for developing mental skills of children.