Abstract

Algebra is the point at which many Nigerian senior secondary students begin to lose ground in mathematics, and lecture-driven instruction has done little to reverse that trend in Ebonyi State. The study examined the effect of the Ludomatic game, a ludo-based instructional board game in which every move depends on solving an algebraic task, on the achievement of Senior Secondary School Two (SS II) students in algebra, and whether achievement under the game differed by gender. A non-equivalent control group pretest-posttest quasi-experimental design was adopted. The population comprised 5,645 SS II students (2,904 males and 2,741 females) in government-owned secondary schools in Ebonyi State. Four co-educational schools were drawn by simple balloting, and 123 students in intact classes took part; two schools formed the experimental group and two the control group. Data were collected with a 40-item Algebraic Achievement Test (AAT), validated by three experts, with an internal consistency coefficient of 0.82 (KuderRichardson 20). Research questions were answered with means and standard deviations, while the hypotheses were tested with analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) at the 0.05 level of significance. Students taught with the Ludomatic game obtained a significantly higher adjusted posttest mean than those taught by the conventional lecture method, F(1, 120) = 96.17, p < .001, partial η² = .45. Male and female students did not differ significantly, F(1, 120) = 0.09, p = .770. The Ludomatic game raised algebra achievement substantially without favouring either gender, which makes it a practical, low-cost strategy for resourceconstrained public classrooms