Today we were introduced to the term ‘Game Based Learning’. Here young learners have the oppertunity to play gaming devices in class, such as a Nintendo Wii or Xbox. “Digital Games-based Learning is the integration of gaming into learning experiences to increase engagement and motivation”, Higher Education Academy (2017).
The actually playing of the game however is a very small part of the term game based learning and this is because the majority of the learning stems from lessons and activities based around said game.
I discovered this for myself today in class, as the class were set a task of designing our very own ‘Super Mario Kart’. The design we decided to move forward with was one of the students in our small group, he had created a Kart that had pizza as wheels.
This lead to the start of our ‘Interdisciplinary Planning’ (IDL). By reading through the CFE we soon realised there were going to be an endless amount of E’s & O’s that we could link to the little pizza wheeled Kart. All these ideas were coming from a simple task that we were set to design our own Super Mario Kart. The areas of the curriculum that we decided to move forward with were Maths, Literacy, Technology and Health and Wellbeing all of which would develop learning and enhance understanding.
Note by this point we hadn’t even touched a gaming device yet the idea was allowing us to plan a full topic for a class of young learners. Below is a draft of our IDL and some examples of the E’s & O’s we decided to use.
MNU 1-07B – Through exploring how groups of items can be shared equally, I can find a fraction of an amount by applying my knowledge of division.
LIT 1-24a – I can present my writing in a way that will make it legible and attractive for my reader combining words, images and other features,
TCH 0-02a – I can use digital technologies to explore how to search and find information.
HWB 1-29a – I enjoy eating a diversity of foods in a range of social situations.
When directed to a website called ‘Edutopia’ I found an article by Miller (2012), he explains about the ‘top three 21st century skills’, two of which are collaboration and communication, which we covered in class. He refers to ‘utilising a team’ to achieve goals which I experienced today in class and also ‘generating effective team directions’ which again we had to do in class today in order to choose a design to use and to decide which areas of the curriculum that we were going to use in our IDL.
These 21st century skills can be related to the following theorists Piaget and Vygotsky as they studied the social groups and were ‘Constructivists’, which believe by doing, playing and adopting roles in groups such as collaboration and cooperation is a vital part of learning and brain development, Higher Education (2017).
In conclusion, I found this very fascinating! Previous to this lesson I would have been quite against game based learning. I thought it would have involved hours of class time playing games and I would not have seen the immediate benefits. Having the oppertunity to speak to our class lecturer and for him tell us of his own reflections of how game based learning works in a classroom has completely changed my views on game based learning. “One of the biggest misunderstandings about games, and people who play them, is that games don’t “teach” anything. It’s assumed that there is no value in the experience”, according to Miller (2012).
I look forward to using similar ideas in the future with my class of young learners.
References
- Higher Education Academy. [Online] Available: https://www.heacademy.ac.uk/knowledge-hub/gamification-and-games-based-learning [Accessed: 10 March 2018].
- Miller, A. (2012) Game-Based Learning to Teach and Assess 21st-Century Skills. [Online] Available: https://www.edutopia.org/blog/game-learning-21st-century-skills-andrew-miller [Accessed: 10 March 2018].
- Scottish Government. (2008) The Curriculum for Excellence. [Online] Available: http://www.education.gov.scot/Documents/all-experiences-and-outcomes.pdf [Accessed: 10 March 2018].
