The Effectiveness Of Using The Mobile Game Simcity In Teaching Technical Vocabulary To Urban Planning Students

Résumé: A picture is worth a thousand words, and a video game is worth a trillion. Learning the technical vocabulary of a discipline is of paramount importance, and seeking more fitting instructional strategies to teach the students, or digital natives, who grew up in the age of technology became a necessity to overcome the lexicon repertoire deprivation they face. Therefore, and in the light of this concept, this dissertation aims at investigating the effects of playing SimCity BuildIt mobile game on learning technical urban planning vocabulary for first year urban techniques management students. In pursuance of testing the hypothesis that SimCity BuildIt gaming induces significant lexicon gain, a mixed method was opted for to obtain the required data. First, a pretest posttest quasi-experimental design was conducted to examine the effect of the game on thirty students at Larbi Ben M'hidi University. They were equally split into experimental and control group, and the vocabulary test results were later analyzed after six weeks of treatment using the t-test. Second, and to investigate the attitudes towards the game, a questionnaire was administered to the fifteen students of the experimental group, and finally, an interview was conducted with five urban planning teachers at the said department. The results of the analysis confirmed the hypothesis and showed that playing SimCity BuildIt mobile game has a boosting effect on the acquisition of the technical vocabulary of the students, together with its gratifying impact which induced the enthusiasm of both students and teachers, despite the difficulty of an official implementation of the game according to the subject matter teachers. With reference to the revealed findings and despite the encountered limitations, it is suggested that teachers rely on the innate features of the new generation to fetch more adequate forms of learning, highlighting the collaboration between ESP and subject matter teachers to render the implementation of the game at the level of the classroom a possible outcome.

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