Developing Educational Mobile Game on Entering School During the New Normal of COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic forced most governments in different parts of the world to close schools temporarily to curtail the spread of the virus. Billions of students, or most of the student population in the world from kindergarten to university level, have stopped their education temporarily. A lot of children, youth, and adults are not attending schools due to the increased spread of COVID-19, and they will be returning back to school in a new normal environment someday. This paper aims to develop a small mobile game to inform students how to adapt to the new normal environment in learning. In developing the application, the researcher conducts qualitative approaches of Game Development Life Cycle that consists of 6 stages: initiation, pre-production, production, testing, beta, and release. It is hope that the new mobile game model would be easier, more fun, and interesting especially for children and youth. This research is still ongoing and is aimed at ensuring that the mobile game is an effective and feasible model to inform students entering the new normal learning environment.