Othman Talib

Male students and digital game: reason, motivation and feeling

The games industry has become one of the most lucrative industries in the world due to the billion dollar sales of digital games. Digital game play is like a culture among majority of students in high schools, especially males who play games every day. This phenomenon has stimulated researchers and academics to further study the various contexts of gaming. This preliminary study has identified the motivating factors of certain games that were able to sustain the interest of five male students in playing those digital games. A basic qualitative research design is adopted as the research method. The findings has reported – five motivating factors which are type of game, content, challenge, control, update and fun that incite students to consistently play the digital games.

How Does Inquiry-Based Instruction Affect Learning in a Secondary School Science Class?

This study used a quasi-experiment with pretest–post-test design (quantitative) to compare thinking skills achievement tests of students who practise structured-inquiry-laboratory practices (St-IQL) and students who only receive classroom teaching (CT) using two biology chapters in secondary schools. Two classes of Form 4 students (n = 64) from two public secondary mixed schools in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, were selected for the study. Higher and lower order thinking skills questionnaires (suggested by Bloom) were handed out in the pretest and post-test. The post-test was administered after both classes had done the treatments, respectively (8 weeks), in order to evaluate the level of students’ thinking skills of biology concepts. The students who were exposed to St-IQL treatment achieved higher post-test mean scores than those who were exposed to CT method. A small effect size (partial eta squared) of 0.23 suggests that 23% of the variance in the post-test scores was related to the differences in the instructional methods.

Authentic Mobile Application for Enhancing the Value of Mobile Learning in Organic Chemistry and Its Pedagogical Implications

This article discusses the application of a prototype educational mobile application for higher education, known as the Organic Chemistry Reaction Application (OCRA), which has been designed to run on any mobile device with touch-screen commands. OCRA allows its users to create their own organic molecules using hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and halogen atoms. Users can use the touch-screen feature to demonstrate the organic reaction mechanism explicitly through an electron-moving technique, which is used to conceptually visualise the mechanistic steps in organic reaction mechanisms. This enables the users to understand the macroscopic and microscopic concepts of organic reaction mechanisms. OCRA provides a gamelike setting with the objective of acquiring correct answers through achieving specific goals. It uses a touch-screen feature to demonstrate the organic reaction mechanism explicitly, while the electron-moving technique is employed to conceptually visualise the mechanistic steps in the organic reaction mechanism. OCRA is used as an alternative tool to aid learning and understanding of organic reaction mechanisms. As a user-controlled tool, OCRA provides convenience and flexibility as well as being capable of enhancing a user’s confidence in learning organic reaction mechanisms. Hence, OCRA is a practical example of an application that has been innovatively designed to enhance the value of learning in the mobile education context. The next challenge is to implement a generic pedagogical model underpinning the design of any mobile application for educational purposes to replace traditional pedagogical approaches.