Concept Retention through Edutainment

Abstract

Teachers and educators worldwide are constantly employing new methods to help their students achieve their learning outcomes. The traditional way of teaching students has been criticized because of not keeping up with the technological advancement, the rote methods employing which the content is taught, and for resulting in students that are ill-prepared. The traditional classroom set-up does not encourage active learning, students are not engaged and don’t feel motivated. The knowledge imparted in such an environment does not stay with students for long, which results in unachieved learning outcomes, and students with poor basic concepts, as they move towards higher education. An approach that has attracted a lot of students and teachers alike, is edutainment. It refers to the amalgam of education and entertainment. Entertainment based education can involve games, videos, television programs, or any interactive application that is educational, yet entertaining. Gamification for learning refers to applying game design to the desired content for achieving specific learning outcomes. This study investigates the outcome of incorporating an interactive learning application into a curricular education, and then access its effectiveness on students’ concept retention. Concept Retention refers to the action of absorbing and continuing to have a grip on a concept when it has been a while after studying the specific subject/lesson/concept. The goal of this study is to investigate if there is a difference in students’ concept retention if the techniques of Video-Based Learning (VBL), Game-Based Learning (GBL), and Problem-Based Learning (PBL) are employed together. An interactive learning application involving VBL, GBL, and PBL was developed after conducting a base study with students of The Smart School, a low-income, co-education private school, located in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. A group of 58 students was selected for the purpose of this study. The topic of “Newton’s Laws of Motion” was taught using an interactive learning application named “Meteor Rush”. Two workshops were conducted to introduce the students to the application, and let them each try it individually. The main resources of this research are the data collected through surveys, pre-test, and post-tests. The data collected was fed to SPSS software, and the statistical analysis was conducted. For testing the significant difference between the mean scores of students before and after the training period, independent t-test was utilized. The significance level chosen was less than 0.05. As, a result of this analysis, it was found out that the students’ mean score consistently increased in each consecutive test, which leads us to believe that an interactive learning application, employing VBL, GBL, and PBL increases students’ retention of the chosen topics.