Rolling the Dice on Learning: Utilizing the Bomber Board Game to Improve Mastery of Simple Interest Among HUMSS Grade 11 students at Luis Y. Ferrer Jr. Senior High School

Abstract

Gamification has emerged as a promising instructional approach for improving student engagement and conceptual understanding in mathematics. This action research examined whether the Bomber Board Game could improve Grade 11 Humanities and Social Sciences (HUMSS) students’ mastery of simple interest at Luis Y. Ferrer Jr. Senior High School. Using a one-group pretest-posttest quasi-experimental design, the study involved 40 students from one Grade 11 HUMSS section selected through purposive sampling. A researcher-made 10-item multiple-choice test was used as both the pretest and posttest. The instrument was reviewed by three experts a Master Teacher in Mathematics, a Business Management Master Teacher, and a Research Master Teacher using a validation checklist. Pilot testing indicated that most items had moderate difficulty; one overly difficult item was revised before the actual implementation. The intervention was administered by the researcher once a week for one month, with each session lasting three hours. Descriptive statistics and a paired-samples t-test were used to analyze the data. Results showed that the mean pretest score was 4.00 (40%), while the mean posttest score increased to 7.25 (72.5%). The improvement was statistically significant, t(39) = 12.27, p < .001, with a very large effect size (Cohen’s dz = 1.94). These findings suggest that the Bomber Board Game may be an effective supplementary strategy for improving students’ understanding of simple interest. However, the results should be interpreted with caution because the study used a single-group design and did not include a formal test of the normality assumption for the paired-samples t-test.