Didactical games made by waste packaging at primary school class degree design and technology

Game consists of various activities of a child or adult. It is defined by universal characteristics and specialities. It changes within child's age and development. Learning goals and assignments can be realized by didactic games during class lessons which are organized and systematic educational process. Didactic game is a game with certain goal and assignment, with selected, organized rules, and subject matter. It encourages activities which are helpful with learning and developing skills. When we intend to design/make a didactic game, we have to know characteristics of the play and its developement stages. We have to consider children's interests, abilities and personal attitude towards game. We also have to check educational effect (learning goals and outcomes). Schools cannot afford to purchase all didactic games which can be used during class lessons. With new ideas we can make didactic games on our own from packaging waste (paper meterial, wood and synthetic material. In this way it is usefully recycled. This diploma thesis provides proposals of crieteria based design of didactic games within Mathematics, Slovene Language, Environmental Education and Social Studies. By creating didactic games we train tehnological procedures and creativity. We also get to know different tools, styling aids and materials. The products created this way can be used at different school subjects. Each didactic game needs to be tested/evaluted by the pupils. We compared games available on the market with handmade games to determine the effect of the game. We performed pedagogical experiment of a random chosen game in the class on the sample of 34 pupils of third grade. The experiment of the commercial game, enrolled 16 pupils, while our game was tested by 18 pupils. The key measure of effectiveness is relative increase of knowledge, measured with the ex-ante and ex-post test. Home made game had relatively higher icrease of knowledge, namely by 2,2 %. We can argue that homemade games (criteria based design) are at least the same effectiveness, even more, higher effectiveness is detetected over the commercial games