The Effects of Integrating Digital Board Game into Prime Factorization Learning on Elementary Students’ Flow Experience

Abstract

Mathematics is an important subject to students. However, students usually have low learning effects on mathematics in traditional classrooms since the learning process is usually quite uninteresting. To address the problem, many researches proposed game-based learning approaches to facilitate mathematics education. Board game is also a popular learning approach in recent years. However, teachers are difficult to capture students’ learning behaviors and status during the traditional board gaming process. With the advancement of technology, technology-supported board game is a possible solution to assist teachers in addressing the above problems. Therefore, this study proposed a digital board game with Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology to support prime factorization learning in mathematics education. The proposed system can capture and record students’ gaming process and teachers can further provide remedial teaching to improve students’ misconceptions. To evaluate students’ flow state while playing the proposed board game, an experiment was conducted in a primary school and 39 students were invited to participate in the experiment. The results revealed that the students achieved positive flow states while playing the proposed board game. Moreover, the boys had better engagement than the girls while playing the proposed board game.