Welcome to Haraya! An English Game-Based Learning Environment for Primary Grade Students in the Philippines

Blended learning in the Philippines has not fully addressed classroom challenges, such as inadequate student engagement attributed to outdated approaches. Welcome to Haraya! is an educational game that immerses students in an innovative and engaging Game-Based Learning Environment (GBLE) and integrates interactive learning of Bloom’s lower-order and higher-order competencies with game mechanics. The competencies are “to remember and apply arguments for a particular stance when they are identified in a scenario or situation” (LO) and “to organize arguments as ‘for’, ‘against’, or ‘irrelevant’ upon being given a specific scenario and situation” (HO). Framed by Communicative Language Teaching and Game-Based Learning Design, the research employed a mixed-methods approach, including a pretest and posttest quasi-experimental design and a survey involving 6th-grade public school and external play testers. Using the MEEGA+KIDS model, the game’s quality was evaluated. T-test and Wilcoxon test showed a significant difference in the performance between the two groups. While the public school students showed no significant improvement in their posttest scores, suggesting a lack of enhancement of their learning, the external play testers’ performance improved, as shown by their posttest scores. The latter’s baseline language proficiency and age may have led to learning. The findings recommend strengthening the teaching of prerequisite skills and improving the game’s iteration to enhance GBLE-enabled instruction.