Examing of middle school students' development of the areaconcept in the digital educational game environment

The aim of this research is to investigate the development of the area concept in 5th and 6th grade students in a digitally designed educational game environment. Qualitative case study has been used in this study. The study consists of two basic stages. The first one is the design of the game and the second one is the application of the game to the students. The researcher used Batista (2003) and Lehrer (2003)'s approaches and pre-concept of area to the development of the area concept. In the game design, the universal design model and the circular model designed are used by the researcher. In the second stage, designed digital game, was applied to each student with the researcher. The data obtained from the actual application were collected in two sections. These are the preliminary and final clinical interviews and observations made during the application, which consist of the process of playing the designed digital game. In the research findings, it was seen that the students did not fully understand the area unit, tiling and row-column skills at the beginning. In the process of playing digital games, they did not know the sub-concepts related to the concept of area but they started to use the concepts by changing the strategies as a result of the mistakes they made during the game. At the end of the digital game, according to the results of the clinical interview, it was observed that all of the students increased from level 1 to the last level of level 6 at the levels defined by Batista (2003).