Developing Students’ Conceptual Understanding and Critical Thinking Through Dunia Hidrokarbon Games

Abstract

Fun learning atmosphere is one of the important things in the learning process. Students need fun learning atmosphere especially when they learn lessons that are considered difficult. Chemistry is one of the subjects considered difficult. Many researchers try to create a fun learning atmosphere by applying educational games. This study aims to investigate the effect of using Dunia Hidrokarbon games on student's conceptual understanding about hydrocarbons and their critical thinking. This study is a sequence of Research and Development work. Participants who involved in this study were six high school students from Bandung city, West Java province, Indonesia. Rasch measurement modelling were utilized to analyze the data. The result shows that students' conceptual understanding about hydrocarbons and critical thinking abilities can be developed by applying Dunia Hidrokarbon games as learning tools. Students can understand concepts on hydrocarbon topics including: carbon atoms, determination of molecular formulas, structures, and names of alkanes, alkenes, and alkynes through Dunia Hidrokarbon games, but they do not understand the concept of structural isomers and position isomers. Students' critical thinking abilities focusing on a question and deciding on an action can be developed, but analyzing arguments, asking and answering questions of clarification and challenge can't be developed.

The Development of Chemistry Electronic Module Based on Guided Discovery Learning on Teaching Chemical Bonding

“…Chemical bonding materials that are more abstract are usually more difficult to understand, related to the relatively many previous understandings of material such as atomic structure, periodic properties of elements, so that they are less motivated to study them [8]. This difficulty can be overcome through learning media [9][10][11], one of which is an electronic module. In the electronic module, an interactive video will be presented that shows an overview of how the interactions between atoms when chemically bonded to form ions and molecules.…”