ABSTRACT

Early age is an appropriate time for children to open their horizons about the surrounding phenomenon leading to the concept of mathematics. Mathematics for early childhood is a way of looking at the children in seeing, experiencing, and understanding the environment around them. Therefore, learning mathematics for children is not only learning numbers, but it can include counting, sorting, measuring, building and describing shapes, finding patterns, estimating, among other experiences. Learning mathematics for children is important because it will make children become more skilled in solving problems in their future.

 

The skills of recognizing the concept of numbers is one of the skills that must be mastered by children aged 4-5 years. It is important for the children because every child needs numbers and numbers are an integral part of life. Unfortunatelly, in practice, there were many children who do not know the number, even in higher education children can experience phobia against mathematics, especially numbers. According to Permendikbud Number 137 in 2014 on the National Standard of Early Childhood, the ability of children aged 4-5 years in recognizing the concept of numbers at least includes the ability in: (a) spelled out many objects, (b) recognizes the concept of numbers, and (c) recognizes the number symbols.

 

The introduction of mathematical concepts in early childhood, especially the introduction of the concept numbers is still done by conventional methods such as a story telling, question and answer, assignment, and direct practice. In fact, today's technology is growing rapidly on all fronts, one of them is the smartphone. Most early childhoods are adept at playing smartphones for recreational purposes rather than educative purposes. Currently, many smartphone users in the world reached 1.86 billion or about 25.7%. From the population of children around the world, early childhood was already starting to use the smartphone that is equal to 63%. When viewed from the side of its use, the most widely used smartphone to play the game, which is equal to 39%. Viewed from groups of children under 12 years old, 62% played games. The types of games that are often played are touch screen games (63%).

 

The existence of the game is one of the utilization of technology in the education field. Currently, more and more applications and games are developed with the aim to support and facilitate the process of children in learning mathematics. To study the concept of numbers, researchers found two types of games developed and provided in the provider application and there are mostly two types of games, which are learning the concept of numbers through object illustrations, and learning the concept of numbers directly in the form of number symbols.

 

This study aims to compare the types of an Illustrative Game (IG) and a Text Game (TG) which are both used for learning about the concept of numbers in children aged 4-5 years. In addition to reviewing the success of child mastery of the concept of numbers, this comparison will also assess whether each game has been using the principles of game development for early childhood. The study involved 30 4-5 year olds, divided into 2 groups of 15 children each who will play IG and TG together to learn the concept of numbers.

Table 1. The result of this study

Aspects

Ilustrative Game (IG)

Text Game (TG)

Spelled out many objects

5.43 (6.52)

4.21 (5.39)

Recognizes the concept of numbers

4.37 (5.78)

2.78 (4.89)

Recognizes the number symbols

3.56 (8.54)

3.93 (8.37)

Child's interest in the game

76.8% (8.67)

58.7% (9.36)

Game difficulty level

47.2% (7.12)

63.5% (8.34)

 

The results of this study indicate that the early skill of children shows there is no significant difference in all aspects of the number concept skills. The posttest results show a significant difference in the counting aspects of many objects, with d= 2.22, t value (30) = - 2.238, and p value = 0.033. Aspects of the number concepts show significant differences with d = 1.59, & t (30) = - 1.898, p = 0.042. In the aspect of knowing the number plates, there is no significant difference, d = 0.37, t value (30) = 2.324, and p value = 0.77. In the child interest aspect of the game, there is a significant difference, with d = 18.1%, & t (30) = 1.197, p = 0.039. Similarly, the game difficulty level showed significantly different results, d = 16.3%,  t value (30) = 2.531, and p value = 0.042. The above results show that overall a illustrative game outperform text games based on pretest and posttest results.

 

The results of this study show that overall learning about the concept of numbers using an Illustrative Game is better than using a Text Game. It seemed from the advantages of the Illustrative Game’s group on the aspects of counting many objects, and recognizing the concept of numbers that significantly outperform the Text Game’s group.  Unfortunatelly, the aspect of recognizing the symbol of the number of differences between two groups is not so significant.

 

In addition, an Illustrative game is more interested for children and it has superior characteristics in teach the concept of numbers in children because it uses many illustrations in the form of objects, which is not owned by the text game. It may indicate that a Illustrative Game is more easily play by the children, so the level of difficulty is also lower than the Text Game. Furthermore, the Illustrative Game is more appropriate used by children aged 4-5 because it considers the children;s characteristics that children are in a praoperational stage.