A Novel Turkish Learning Environment for Foreign Primary School Students: The Educational Digital Game 'Journey to Turkish'

The present study aimed to discuss the development of an educational digital game for Turkish language instruction as a second language to foreign primary school students. First, the correlation between digital games and education was discussed, the learning and motivational theories fundamental to the educational digital games were investigated, the educational digital game design models and educational digital games in second language instruction were addressed. Finally, the development of the educational digital game "Journey to Turkish", which was based on the spiral educational game design model for the instruction of Turkish language to foreign primary school students, was detailed. The "Journey to Turkish" game was developed in four stages: analysis, design, development-implementation and evaluation; the process was based on the constructivist learning theory and social cognitive learning approach, a cognitive learning theory, flow theory, a motivational theory, and ARCS-V model. The game "Journey to Turkish," a three-dimensional, single player, task-based role-playing game was developed on the Unity 3D platform. The game includes seven stages, each part corresponds to the themes in the Turkish A1 language level. In the game, the player visits seven cities, namely Eskisehir, Çanakkale, Nevsehir, Konya, Adiyaman, Izmir and Istanbul, and collects certain cultural items by completing reading and writing tasks.