If you carefully choose the right sort of game it will engage the children in your class – in my opinion you have to take that as a given. It is what you do with that engaged group of children and how you make a difference to their learning that counts.
- Games can be used in isolation – they can be just as effective in single lessons.
- Don’t dwell on just the game – think beyond it, how can you leverage that enthusiasm.
- Make time for your own play. Set up a different save profile, that way you can stay one step ahead.
- Plan ahead, but also decide not to plan! Discovery in gaming is an important part of the experience – sharing the unexpected with your class is amazing.
- Explore the literature surrounding the game, online walkthroughs and game manuals are a great way to encourage reading and writing.
- Mimic the immersive nature of the gaming environment in your classroom.
- Build displays that develop with time as the unit/game progresses.
- Allow the children to play independently as well as in small groups.
- Step back and watch the community of practice develop – you will see children exploring things together, explaining and sharing.
- Consider using the game in a different room with a small focus group, which sometimes allows them to have a much more in depth experience.
The clearest message from my experiences I can offer is to leverage the children’s enthusiasm into other areas of the curriculum.
Pic: get big! by Don Solo – Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License
There are few company who create this kind of learning and I salute those companies who are currently working on this type of learnig process. This is one way kids won’t be bored while studying their lessons.
People are easy to learn when they love what they are doing so using game based learning is a great and can help the children even more in their studies.
I think one way to easy and fun learning is using games. Hopefully more programmers will create a game based learning..
Great tips! Game Based Learning always works better for me. We just don’t learn but we also enjoy
A lot of your insights can be found established in the classroom practice of many teachers in Scotland (and elsewhere) Tom. It might be helpful for some of your readers to look at ‘how’ these ideas to take GBL to the next level can be done in practice. I won’t list the extensive range of classroom practice evidence that we have up here but most of it can be accessed from this link http://www.ltsblogs.org.uk/consolarium . There are some crackingly original and insightful examples of GBL practice here.
I have recently made the decision to give as much valuable content away as possible. I feel much better since I’ve been doing it and I think the main reason is because I have stopped putting pressure on myself to make money from my blog.Now, I see deals coming in and I don’t really know why, but I think it’s because of the sowing principle. It’s really golden and until you understand that principle, you will be ONE frustrated blogger
I see what you refer to in point 1 – but I have not been as clear as I could have been about isolation. What I mean is that often games are used over a period of many lessons or a unit of work that lasts many weeks. Gaming can be used for single one off lessons – that are “isolated” from larger projects. That just stand alone. I have had success using Wii games in single one hour lessons. This structure is useful and handy as it requires less time investment.
Great observations Tom. It’s interesting that respected game designer and writer Chris Crawford says “the requirement for player interaction puts activities such as jigsaw puzzles and solitaire ‘games’ into the category of puzzles rather than games.” And therefore I’m not sure he’d agree with your point (1) above. Perhaps that’s being a little pedantic though 😉
So simple, fantastic! Seems so obvious now!
Agreed, I set up a trolley last May with my PS1 / PS2 and PS3 consoles cable-tidied power supplies and AV outputs and a basket underneath for all the controllers as I used to move classrooms quite a lot. However I haven’t used the trolley this year as I’ve been lucky enough to lay claim to a classroom of my own. I got inspired to use the trolley by thinking back to how early computers were shared between all the classrooms in my own primary school. The trolley even had its own TV/monitor – now if I could get THAT set up!!
Great list Tom, brings together a lot of ideas in a really simple way. There are points here that will further my gbl planning, like a shared display and creating an environment that supports the nature of gaming – independent gaming is interesting, I would have liked the kinect to be available in choosing, would be interesting to see how that would work in the middle of a busy classroom!
Thinking about the gaming environment, it would be great to play in different places and group sizes, which is something i experimented with alot. I found that it’s difficult to organise a game between two rooms, too many leads to plug and unplug and carry between rooms. Would be good to have two consoles available sometimes.