A CASE STUDY ON EARLY CHILDHOOD PRE-SERVICE TEACHERS’ INTEGRATION OF EDUCATIONAL COMPUTER GAMES INTO THE INSTRUCTION IN THEIR LESSON PLANS

This qualitative case study aimed to investigate how early childhood education pre-service teachers integrate educational computer games to the instruction in their lesson plans. The participants of the study consisted of twelve early childhood education pre-service teachers who enrolled to the Instructional Technology and Material Design course on 2011-2012 academic year spring semester. The data consisted of lesson plans prepared by pre-service teachers, open ended questionnaire results, and focus group interviews. The results showed that 10 out of 12 pre-service teachers planned their instruction according to constructivist philosophy. Moreover, 6 out of 10 pre-service teachers used educational computer games to make children realize something about topic; 4 of them used them to assess children’s learning; and the other 2 used them to make children practice about topic.