DOI: 10.5176/2251-1679_CGAT14.32
Authors: Nada Saleh, Edmond Prakash and Rob Manton
Abstract:
Edutainment is a kind of education which integrates entertainment for educational purposes and uses video games for education. It is a hybrid learning system that depends basically on narrative, visual materials or game-like formats, with less didactic address styles and on a more informal way. The goal of this game-based learning method is to hold and attract the attention of the students by gaining their emotions through a computer with full vividly coloured animations courses. It engages interactive education and is totally based on an obsessive persistence that learning is inexorably “fun”. Edutainment, just like other technology-based education methods, is being used in western or developed countries. At present, technology-based education is slowly being introduced and implemented in learning in developing countries. Saudi Arabia is considered a developing country just like other Arab countries; hence, computer education has recently appeared in Saudi Arabian education. Therefore, studying this new development in the Saudi educational systems will effect significantly on the speed of developing the educational systems in Saudi Arabia. Implementing edutainment tools in the educational system at Saudi Arabia is one of the new research areas that are attracting most researchers in the fields of educational technologies. As a result of this popularity for education and technology in Saudi Arabia, the educational ministry of Saudi Arabia implemented a new curriculum, computer technology, to be studied in the private and governmental schools within Saudi Arabia. However, no edutainment games have been designed for this new curriculum. Therefore this research ultimately aims to design a new edutainment game to be used for the computer technology curriculum. To design an efficient edutainment game system, edutainment game effectiveness and the attitudes of students will be measured to know their technology acceptance level for the new edutainment tool and curriculum. Therefore the main aim of this study is to find the factors that affect students’ attitudes towards game-based learning, and the effectiveness in student learning. The study is carried out using Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), based on four factors; usability, usefulness, ease of use and effectiveness. The study will analyze the relationship between these factors and attitude towards edutainment. This is done in order to find out the most influential factor on Saudi students’ attitude towards using edutainment games in their learning.
Keywords: edutainment; games in learning; technology acceptance
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