BOARD-GAMES IN THE PRIMARY CLASSROOM: TEACHERS' PRACTICE AND OPINION

Playing board-games is fun for both children and adults. But it is not only a joyful activity, it also develops different skills of the player, as communication skills, strategy creating, problem solving competency, cooperation, etc. Nowadays there are many board-games on sale, active board-game playing communities organize events, and a culture of playing board-games is developing. Thus, integrating board-games in educational activities seems to be a natural process to follow. But this integration has many obstacles, as time and curriculum constrain, the lack of methodological knowledge of the teachers, inadequate choose of educational board-games for some subjects, etc. The aim of our research is to study primary school teachers' attitude towards integrating board-games in teaching, the advantages they see, and the obstacles they experience. For this purpose, a questionnaire was developed by the authors with 23 questions, both closed and open questions. 75 primary school teachers have filled in the questionnaire. The results show that a high percentage of the respondents use board-games in classroom, about one third of them on a weekly bases. Most of the games used are developed for educational purposes. Hungarian language is the discipline with the most extensive use of board-games, followed by Mathematics and Moral Education. Board-games are more frequently used for exercising skills and knowledge or giving feedback for pupils. Usually they allow 16-30 minutes to play the game on a lesson. Teachers see many advantages of playing board-games, like it is fun, it facilitates learning, it develops the problem solving competence and the strategical-logical thinking, it develops cooperation skills and acts as team-building activity, etc. Only some respondents gave also some disadvantages, as it is time consuming, needs a well-organized class management, and not all the pupils like board-games. The list of advantages given by the respondents is way longer than the list of disadvantages. Teachers are also aware about the obstacles of using board-games, as time and curriculum constrains, class-management problems. The research has two main limitations. Analyzing the examples given by the respondents, not all of them are board-games, so for some of them the notion board-game is not well-defined. Also, the questionnaire was voluntarily filled in, and there is a higher chance to be filled by someone who is interested in board-games.