VALIDATION OF A DIDACTIC INTERVENTION BASED ON VIDEO GAMES FOR THE TEACHING OF SUSTAINABILITY CONTENTS IN SECONDARY EDUCATION

Science is considered to be one of the pillars of today's society. However, numerous studies suggest that secondary school students have negative attitudes and emotions towards learning scientific-technological content. Based on this, the present work focuses on the design of a didactic intervention based on the use of video games as a useful resource for the learning of sustainability contents from both a cognitive and affective point of view. The design of the research developed was of a quasi experimental type with control group, experimental group, pre-test and post-test. The general objective was to design and validate a didactic intervention based on video games for the teaching of sustainability contents. The sample consisted of 81 secondary school students, selected by non-probability sampling. During the development of the intervention, cognitive, behavioral, attitudinal and emotional variables were measured in order to measure the academic progress, the emotions experienced during the different activities, the behavior and attitude of the students towards the environment. As a measuring instrument, a questionnaire was designed with questions grouped by domain using information from various sources. The experience was carried out through three sessions in which the students participated in an introductory session, and had to perform a different reinforcement activity depending on the group they were in. The control group did a treasure hunt using mobile phones to search for information. The experimental group used video games as a reinforcement activity. The results obtained reveal that the students who used the video game obtained better results, finding that video games influence the academic progress experienced. On the other hand, the didactic intervention did not affect the attitude or the environmental behavior of the students independently of the methodology used. Regarding emotions, it was observed that video games positively affected the emotions experienced by students and contributed to reducing boredom.