The Bah Luit’s challenge: an edutainment approach for Malaysian students

Today's schools face major problems around student motivation and engagement. Gamification, or the incorporation of game elements into non-game settings, provides an opportunity to help schools solve these difficult problems. The project is a continuous innovation from the researcher’s Edutainment approach based on Semai’s indigenous folktales. The researchers designed a package inclusive of interesting games based on the Malaysian folktale; the Bah Luit’s Adventure. The uniqueness about the product is the games incorporates technology and the culture of the indigenous. The aim is to provide an interactive and an engaging way to teach short story to school students. The game is pilot tested to school students as part of the corporate social responsibility (CSR) project. To guide the students, during the activity, students were given three materials to assist them such as animated cartoons, the manuscript and an audio consists of the Bah Luit’s Adventure shorty story. Students were asked to complete the games accordingly. In finishing the game, students need to answer questions based on the short story that they have listened. After completing the game, students were asked to answer Likert scale responses and give feedback. The result shows that students enjoyed this edutainment-based approach activity. The findings on this innovative project should contribute to deeper understanding on how gamification can impact ESL students’ learning and how using the stories from indigenous people can enhance cross-cultural awareness and acceptance of different traditions. Since gamification has exciting elements which can be motivating to the students, the videos and online quiz questions created have great commercialization potential. The videos uploaded on YouTube will be able to garner followers and the online questions uploaded on Quizzes can be accessed by any ESL learners. Innovations in second language teaching are desirable because such practices will help students’ engagement and motivation in the classroom.