Gender differences in students’ learning achievements and awareness through residence energy saving game-based inquiry playing

Abstract

Energy consumption and conservation is one of the important topics in Energy Education, whereby students are required to understand the factors of energy consumption leading to promote students’ awareness on saving energy in residence. Moreover, inquiry-based learning strategy can be used to encourage students’ learning in the topic. Although, several researchers studied on how to use digital games to improve understand the topic. However, a few studies have been conducted to investigate what the gender differences in playing and learning energy game-based learning are. In this vein, this paper address this issue by investigating the gender differences in learning achievement and energy-saving awareness through a digital game based on inquiry-based learning called Residence Energy Saving Battle (RES-battle). An experiment has been conducted on a secondary school physics course. The experimental results from 129 students indicate that the RES-battle can decrease the difference between female and male learning achievements reasonably and energy-saving awareness. This suggests a need to develop the game that can provide the opportunities for interaction on game screen and also with other students.