Ok, I know I’m going to be doing a bit of fanboying here but
I feel that if you are interested in this subject you should check this out.
Early in my interaction with virtual reality technology, I stumbled upon this
YouTube channel called Extra Credit. I have shown you a video from them in a
previous post. They are a small group of game developers who talk about good
practices and other things happening in the game development world. Their
content ranges on a variety of different topics including how games can be used
in education. I will include several of these video in this post so if you’re
interested please check them out they. The work they do may fundamentally
change the way you look at games and maybe even design. Now that that is out of
the way, let’s look at how games can be used for education. The most obvious
would have to be gamification and it’s probably the most simplest to implement.
Image from: http://teaching.uncc.edu/technology-workshop/2016-02-16/interactive-faculty-gamification-workshop-session-2
Gamification is a term to describe the process of bringing game like elements
into things other than games. In other words, the classroom. One of the
examples of this is to implementing a process chart into student learning. For
more extreme examples just look at the website Khan Academy or Class Craft.
Khan academy uses a badge system to increase student learning and mark
progress, while class craft uses RPG game elements to make classroom management
a little more fun. Games are a great medium for implementing things we hold
value in modern education, namely qualities like critical thinking,
communication, collaboration, personal agency and many more. Games can be used
to empower their players with skills and the ability to control what happens
around them with little to no penalties for the learner. This though, is just a
small part of the argument and I suggest you look into it further.
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