The effect of mobile game-supported compassion education on summer Quran course students: The case of Kemalpasa district, Izmir province

Today, accelerating technological developments have become indispensable in every field. The opportunities offered by technology have led to changes in various areas, including lifestyle, information acquisition, and education at every stage of human life. As a result of these developments, it is inevitable to use tools and materials suitable for the age in the education system. This is also true for religious education. Religious education should be turned into an opportunity to protect children and young people from harmful content created by mass media, which is used as a way of obtaining information. Studies have shown that children and young people who are affected by the content broadcast increase their tendency towards violence. In this respect, it is essential to provide compassion education to children and young people with the opportunities offered by technology. In this research, it was aimed to examine this value by giving Compassion Education with Information Technologies to 5-8th- grade students in the summer Quran courses in various mosques affiliated to the Kemalpasa District Mufti's Office of Izmir Province in the summer period of 2024-2025. In our study, we aimed to establish a cause-and-effect relationship with the experimental design model. One of the experimental designs was determined as the experimental group (where the mobile application was applied) and the other as the control group (where the teaching was done normally). In this study, we tried to reduce the margin of error by performing pre-test and post-test control group measurements for the groups mentioned above. For this reason, the same students and teacher practitioners were used in the study. In the study, the students were divided into experimental and control groups on the basis of volunteerism, and care was taken to keep the groups homogeneous in terms of gender and age. The study was conducted with twenty-nine students in the experimental group and twenty-nine students in the control group, totaling fifty-eight students. Lessons were held with the control group as specified in the summer Quran course curriculum. In the experimental group, the mobile application prepared by the researcher for the sense of compassion education was applied. In this study, a computer game developed to increase the compassion levels of students at the basic education level was used. The game included enriched video and puzzle content that encouraged passing the levels. The implementation started in July and continued for four weeks. Within the scope of the research, two separate student groups were formed as experimental and control groups. Before the implementation, the Compassion Scale was administered to both groups as a pretest. During the following four weeks, only the experimental group was presented with various content activities through the mobile application. After the completion of the application, the same scale was reapplied to both groups as a post-test. The 24-item "Compassion Scale," adapted into Turkish by Akdeniz and Deniz, was used as a data collection tool in the study. The scale evaluates the compassion of individuals towards others in six different dimensions. The quantitative data obtained were evaluated by the content analysis method. The findings of the study showed that the intervention through a mobile application positively affected the compassion levels of the students in the experimental group. Keywords: Religious Education, Value, Education, Compassion, Mobile Application.