Didactic games for teaching science are designed

As a result of the combination between the Industrial Design Program and the Master in Exact and Natural Sciences Teaching in the campus, a series of didactic objects to facilitate the learning process of exact and natural sciences was designed for high school students in the region.

The objects are a didactic carpet for the teaching of length, a colorful object for the teaching of electronic configuration, a 3D jigsaw puzzle, and algebraic bingo, an object for learning the Cartesian plane, and a role game for the protection of the environment.

The objects, designed by nine students from the last semesters of the Industrial Desing program, and supported by pedagogic strategies proposed by six students of the Master in Teaching, aim at improving the learning conditions through entertaining games that capture students" attention.

Professor Boris Villamil, director of the Design Department at Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Palmira, mentioned the importance of these didactic materials: "the idea is that students learn knowledge areas that are complex for them, such as algebra chemistry, mathematics, and even environment sciences, in a easy and dynamic way, by means of these objects that are colorful, interactive and very funny," asserted the professor.

During the elaboration, the master"s students created didactic strategies at low production costs.

For Professor Carmen Elena Mier, coordinator of the Master in Exact and Natural Sciences Teaching, this is the result of both, the integration between two solid programs, and the effort to improve the learning conditions for students.

"During this exercise, we mixed two very important academic programs for designing didactic objects to help teachers, who sometimes do not have the necessary resources, to teach these knowledge areas in a creative way;" asserted  Mier.

These objects, which were tested by students from different institutions in Valle del Cauca, obtained excellent results that proved their effectiveness in terms of understanding and learning.

"Students were very interested when using these objects. They easily understood the dynamics and mentioned that the classes were much more entertaining and their learning process was better," asserted Liliana Sandoval, teacher at Instituto Técnico Industrial Comuna 17 in Cali.

The objects

The didactic carpet: it is a game for sixth grade students. It aims at contributing to the understanding of lengths. The idea is that students start in a specific point and reach the finishing line by calculating measurement units given as a clue.

3D jigsaw puzzle: designed for 7^th and 8^th grade students for learning algebra. The idea is solving equations with the objective of completing the figure of a cube.

Algebraic bingo: it is like a bingo but the chips that the students must cover are equation results that the teacher provides.

Role game: a didactic game in which students can, by using tools, filtrate contaminant agents in water and learning how to take care of this important resource.

ElektroBall: for students age 12 to 14, it was designed as scale. The objective is to contribute to the learning of electronic configurations to be easily expressed on paper.   

Cartesian Game: it helps understanding the Cartesian plane through two didactic boars where students have the equations and locate the results in the Cartesian plane.