IMPROVING THE VOCABULARY MASTERY THROUGH WORD-CONNECTION GAME

Many students face difficulties to express their mind, ideas and feelings because lack of vocabulary. This fact makes them loose the point of information and lead them to the thought that English is a difficult subject, till even frustration. This is why every student must master vocabulary, because when they do, it will be easy for them to master the four language skills. This reasearch aimed to find (1) whether the use of Word-Connection game significantly improved the students vocabulary mastery of the first grade students of English Education in Universitas Muslim Maros on academic year 2018/2019, and (2) their attitudes toward the use of this game. Method of this research was experiment with 2 classes as the subjects. It employed 30 numbers of vocabulary test then analyzed by using inferential statistic SPSS program 25.0 and 20 numbers of close-ended questions questionnaire to find out their attitude towards the use of Word-Connection game. Result of the calculation data said that the mean score improved significantly at the experiment group from 3.476 to 8.356, but at the control group only from 3.950 to 4.550. Standard deviation at experiment group decreased from 1.2444 to 0.9238 and at control group from 1.5472 to 1.7604. Range on normalized gain score at the experiment group was 0.37, smaller than control group which was 0.43. Standard deviation on normalized gain score at experiment group was 0.115511 whereas at control group was 0.11075. Furthermore, data which were collected from questionnaire indicated that the students had positive attitude toward the use of Word-Connection game with mean score 82.68. Findings above concludes that the use of Word-Connection game can improve the students vocabulary mastery at the experiment group.

Connection Games and Sperner’s Lemma

This chapter provides an introduction to connection games in general. It also recounts how Sperner's Lemma, a result about labeling a triangulation of a simplex, can be used to prove that someone must win at Hex—the best-known connection game—as well as The Game of Y®, (or simply, Y) another well-known connection game. Moreover, the chapter proves a generalization of Sperner's Lemma and uses it to show that there is always a winner in the many variations of Atoll and Begird, two connection games which can be played on a variety of boards and include Hex and Y, respectively, as special cases. These “must-win” results have significant strategic implications—if one prevents the opponent from making the desired connection, one would be able to make this connection by necessity.

THE SEPARATION GAME

The separation game is different from the connection game, but has some similarities. In the game of Go, it is often useful because it helps to enclose groups and areas. An evaluation function, moves generation functions and a search algorithm for the separation game are described in this paper.