Didactic games in teaching motion in the 1st and 4th grade of primary school

The courses of Environmental Sciences and Natural Sciences and Technology include contents which enable students to learn about the world in which they live. The teacher's task is to encourage the pupils’ curiosity through direct experience, so that they may deepen and expand their already formed concepts and ideas about the world that surrounds them. The teacher must make sure that the lessons are varied, which can be achieved by combining a number of different teaching methods. In most cases however, a single method is still prevalent. Many studies have confirmed the positive effects of the method of didactic games. The method enables pupils to activate multiple sensory processes during lessons, due to having an active role in activities, which makes learning more memorable and consequently the knowledge acquired more durable. The topic of motion is first addressed in the pre-school, as the pre-school curriculum suggests that the child discovers different types of motion, gets to know what causes them and what it takes to maintain them. When entering primary school, children upgrade this knowledge with more detailed descriptions and additional examples of different types of motion. In the last three years of primary school they describe the causes and effects of motion in greater detail using graphs, measuring speed and describing the physical forces that influence objects in motion. This has led to the objectives of MA thesis: to find out how and in what way didactic games contribute to the understanding of the topic of motion in the 1st and 4th grade; to evaluate the impact of the use of didactic games on the understanding of concepts related to motion compared to traditional teaching methods and lastly; to take a look at the activity of pupils within the two age groups attending traditional lessons in comparisson with pupils attending lessons using games; and find out what kind of experiences teachers have with the use of didactic games. In order to approach the objectives of the thesis, we have designed a study with appropriate research questions. The study included descriptive, causal and quasi-experimental methods of pedagogical research, and interlaced both qualitative and quantitative research approaches. The study involved 42 pupils from first grade attending one town school and 43 pupils from fourth grade attending a different town school. The students of each grade were divided into two groups, experimental group and control group. Data was collected with pretest and posttests for the pupils and a questionnaire for their teachers. In these classes we conducted lessons in which we taught the topic of force and motion by didactic games method in experimental group and by traditional teaching methods in control group. The results show that all the surveyed teachers are familiar with the method of didactic games and also use it when they consider it to be more appropriate than other teaching methods. Educational games have a positive impact on pupils, when they are learning new content. Pupils of both groups have achieved the learning aims and there were no statistically significant differences between the performances on the posttest of the two groups. Due to the limited number of participants and time spent with them, the research findings can not be generalised