Educational games for Astronomy teaching in Elementary Education

Abstract

Astronomy, although present in classrooms, sometimes appears as a series of difficult to understand contents. The Olympiad of Astronomy and Astronautics (OBA), an event held since 1998, was created as an important educational resource, a dissemination tool which aims to stimulate the interest of young people on the subject, act as an important aid in learning, in order to contribute to improve school performance. This paper presents three educational games developed and applied in a public school in the Northwest of the State of Rio de Janeiro, with a view to preparing elementary school students to participate in OBA. The games were made with low cost and easy to purchase materials. For evaluation of game usability, understanding and clarity of rules, it applied a questionnaire with eight closed questions and an open question. Analysis of the questionnaires, as well as the results obtained in OBA, indicates that developed games fulfilled their goals, contributing to the process of teaching and learning takes place in a fun, didactic and pleasant way. The work with these teaching tools for astronomy study produced a special area of construction and popularization of scientific knowledge with a critical and constructive look, which, it is often ignored in everyday schoolwork.