A proposal of a game for education and environmental consciousness

Abstract

This work presents the use of digital games which contain Role Playing Games (RPG) features as the main pedagogical teaching tool in contemporary education, for both child and adult, for academic and corporate purposes equally. It is proposed that through the use of the games playfulness, the students' attention will be grabbed, ergo enhancing teaching by the use of a rule system, which has been created taking as base those from RPGs, therefor making players' learning subtle and flexible. For such purpose, an electronic game prototype, which uses a typical RPG atmosphere, has been developed, such game has playful elements, focusing on the child's ecological awareness development, also aiming environmental education and inferring an "action/reaction" set of social and individual attitudes towards the environment. It is emphasized that, by allocating the children's shared imagination while developing a persistent universe, in which the player must cooperate with one another, or at least with a set of already conceived rules, a virtual universe where learning the desired competences is more likely will be reached. This work highlighted the ability of electronic games in the RPG style as an interesting tool to support teaching. This work presents its importance mostly by demonstrating that education is still evolving and should keep being studied. Tests with a group of kids, whose ages ranged from 8 to 10 years, were made. Such tests measured and compared the results in order to discover whether the game was indeed helpful or not. Comparing the average initial results of the first tests and the ones of the second set, there is improvement. This demonstrates that the use of games for teaching can bring tangible benefits and in short term can help with subjects that are routinely not well assimilated. Even though the tests where applied only to children the literature supports the claim that games are an important tool for learning regardless of age. Copyright © 2015 by the University of Taubaté.