Today in digital technologies (06/03/2018) we were investigating games-based learning within the classroom. I was apprehensive in the beginning as to how this would in fact benefit and enhance a child’s learning within school. However, it was brought to my attention how flexible the capacities of various games were and how easily adaptable they were to cross curricular areas. According to the Edutopia website the term games-based learning means “like novels, films, plays and other media, games can be high quality materials a teacher uses to enable students to access the curriculum”.

With this type of learning however, Learning Scotland also identified a variety of different problems that may arise through this form of teaching in the classroom such as the cost, identifying a suitable game, integrating the game – time/structure of the day and also teacher confidence/skills. Although these are huge issues, I believe with more awareness in schools many of these can be overcome and can in fact benefit pupils in a huge way within modern society.

We were given the opportunity within the class to create a mind-map surrounding reasons why games-based learning may be incorporated into a lesson and how it may benefit a child. At the beginning of the session we came up with ideas such as it is interactive, engaging, there’s a connection between home and school life, and it can also be used as a cross curricular activity over a variety of different lessons. After further investigation and thought, we discovered it also reinforced knowledge, it was stress free and also useful for children who have additional support needs.

During this session we were also given the opportunity to create an Interdisciplinary Learning Plan (IDL), based on the game Super Mario Kart. We chose six CfE areas to base our lessons upon, alongside the Es and Os that would be covered. We created lesson ideas for literacy, IT, numeracy, health and wellbeing, art and expressive arts (music).

I found this activity very fun as we could be creative, however also realistic within designing these activities. It was good to also share lessons with other groups as it was interesting to hear a variety of different ideas all based upon the one original features of Mario Kart.

Overall, I found the first input of games-based learning very interesting as I was surprised to see how wide one idea can be covered over different CfE areas whilst still remaining informational and beneficial for the children. I was apprehensive to begin with at the thought of this being used within the classroom, however after further investigation this is definitely something that I believe should be incorporated into more schools in modern day society, and in the future for when I hopefully become a primary teacher too.

References

https://education.gov.scot/ [Accessed 08/03/2018]https://www.edutopia.org/article/3-ways-use-game-based-learning-matthew-farber [Accessed 08/03/2018]