Summary:
Lately, in the international literature there has been a growing trend in using games in the teaching of chemistry in secondary and higher education. These games are primarily digital, but also card games and board games. The scope of this research was to investigate whether and to what extent the introduction of high school chemistry concepts via the use of card games may contribute to a better understanding and to a short-term and medium-term retention of learning, as compared to the traditional teacher-centered method. The games that were designed and implemented, were (Chem)4mula, which deals with the writing of chemical formulae and inorganic nomenclature, ValenShells which is about the ionic and covalent bonds and memOrganic that focuses on the different classes of organic compounds, according to their functional groups.
The three games are prototypes and were designed by the writer of this thesis, and they were tested with 240 in total K-10 and Κ-11 students. During the designing step, apart from following principles of game architecture, an attempt was made to incorporate elements from learning theories such as the theory of internal motivation and Vygotsky's social constructivism’s theory, psychologist’s Csikszentmihalyi flow theory, but also principles of collaborative learning.
According to the results of the quantitative survey, the two games applied in K-10 contributed to a more effective retention of knowledge in a two-month’s time period. In the third game used with K-11 students, there were no statistically significant differences in the retention of learning between teacher-oriented approach and teaching with card games.
Keywords:
card games, chemical bonding, nomenclature, motivation theory, nomenclature
