Universität zu Köln

In order to enhance students’ intrinsic motivation and learning achievement in the field of semantics, we developed the board game Seamantix, which supports teaching in introductory semantics through autonomous learning. Seamantix focuses on basic semantic knowledge including semantic relations, propositional logic, truth-conditional semantics, semantic roles and verb classifications. Players of Seamantix explain semantic notions without speaking by positioning tokens on pictograms and thereby provide their fellow players with critical cues. An evaluation of the learning curve via a practice test presented before and after exposure to the board game revealed that students who played the game showed a significant improvement compared to a non-playing control group. Furthermore, the majority of the players rated the design and material associated with the game positively and indicated that they enjoyed playing it.

English