An educational game-based approach to learning Geometry in Elementary School: A preliminary study

Abstract

Learning geometry is paramount in mathematics to identify geometric shapes and learn their properties. The use of educational games in the classroom offers new opportunities to motivate students and to learn mathematics in daily-life contexts from a socio-constructivist perspective within the fallibilist and quasi-empiricist positions. The aim of this paper is to design and evaluate a teaching unit on geometry for elementary school, where the basis of learning is articulated through different educational games integrated together in the sequence, allowing us to compare the acquired learning with the results of more traditional tasks. The preliminary study was developed with 13 seven-year-old students from a school in Malaga (Spain). For each content, traditional tasks (worksheets with scarce opportunities in the social context) and games (together with task involving play - TIP or tasks promoting scenarios between play and game) were included in the teaching unit. The qualitative and quantitative analysis of each task using categories and the Wilcoxon test showed that educational games are more favorable to the learning of geometry than the contents proposed with a traditional task, in particular, those related to the identification of polygons. The results suggest that the type of educational game that is most effective in learning geometry is TIP, since only in these games statistically significant differences were obtained when compared to traditional tasks.