Development and effectiveness of educational games inscience teaching as supplementary material on students'achievement and attitude towards science

The main purpose of this study was explore to the effectiveness of developing educational games in science teaching as supplementary material on 7th grade students' academic achievement and their attitudes towards science focusing on particulate nature of matter and pure substances concepts in "The Properties and Structure of Matter" unit. A single-group pre-test post-test poor experimental design was used in the study and 17 seventh grade students participated in the study in the 2017-2018 school year. Achievement Test and Attitude towards Science Questionnaire were implemented to this single group as a pre- and post-test, and the quantitative data was collected; on the other hand the data collected from Game Designing Writing Form gave the qualitative data. As an implementation, the particulate nature of matter and pure substances concepts in the Properties and Structure of Matter unit last four weeks and following five weeks students design educational games focusing on the particulate nature of matter and pure substances concepts. The instruments were given before and after the implementation to determine achievement and attitude towards science. The students were asked to fill reflection papers in order to get their ideas on designing process. In order to analyze the quantitative data SPSS 13 program was used. The results revealed that developing educational games supported science teaching had significant effect on academic achievement and attitude towards science. On the other hand, gender was not a significant effect neither on achievement nor on attitude towards science when educational games were used as supplementary material. It can be concluded that, using educational games as supplementary material in science teaching and learning is effective on students' achievement and attitude towards science since the students developed the educational games on their own focusing on the aforementioned concepts and concentrated on integrating concepts into the game design while enjoying the process.