WEB GAME DEVELOPMENT

Web Game Development

Abstract

This study aimed to design and evaluate web games which were based on the theories of children's development of taxonomic concepts. Factors that might affect children's classification skills, such as use of single physical characteristics of objects, competition between thematic and taxonomic relationships, difficulty in forming hierarchical categories, were identified. Several strategies for overcoming the above disadvantages, such as verbal hints, linguistic labelling, exemplar comparison, and explicit statements were implemented in the Software for Rebuilding Taxonomy (SoRT) for improving children's taxonomic concept learning. Sixty children, aged 4 and 5, participated in the evaluation of SoRT. The results showed that the SoRT was helpful to improve children's distinction between thematic and taxonomic relationships and their learning of hierarchical taxonomic concepts.

1. Introduction

Taxonomic concepts are fundamental to advanced learning of logical and numerical concepts. Studies on young children's classification abilities for the last two decades have indicated that young children display some important characteristics in making classifications. First of all, young children show different preferences for various cognitive dimensions as they get older. This preference for specific dimensions affects children's allocation of attention for objects or pictures, which in turn influences on the efficiency of their problem solving ([Cunningham and Odom, 1978] and [West and Odom, 1979]). The second characteristic is the competition of thematic relationship vs. taxonomic relationship. Many studies (Borghi & Caramelli, 2003; [Greenfield and Scott, 1986] and [Lucariello et al., 1992]) demonstrate that under the influence of their life experiences, young children organize knowledge mainly by using episodic memory representations. Also, they are inclined to classifying things in a thematic manner (e.g., among the cats, dogs and bones, dogs are likely to be classified in the same category as bones). Nevertheless, with the increase in age and abstract knowledge, semantic memory takes precedence in memory representation.

Thirdly, formal knowledge is another determinant factor of children's ability of classification, especially super ordinate categories. Scholars have proposed that life experiences may play an important role in forming horizontal relationships (i.e., links between items at the same level of hierarchical taxonomy). However, formal training or education may be more important in forming the super ordinate relationships among the items at different levels of taxonomic hierarchy, because such relationships rely on more abstract, and non-event understanding of functions ([Lucariello et al., 1992], [Smiley and Brown, 1979] and [Vandierendonck and Rosseel, 2000]).

Based on the fact that there has been scarce cognitive-theory-based software for young children and in recognition of the need for more specific and elaborate principles for designing domain-related web learning environments, this study sets its primary goal to illustrate how to design a domain-specific and theory-based learning environment for young children. This study implemented web games based on theories related to the development of taxonomic concepts. By incorporating psychological principles of learning categorical concepts into the design of content and feedback (see next section), the web materials aim to overcome the difficulties children may encounter and to establish a hierarchy of concepts about classification. The second purpose of this study ...