Education and Fun: The Educational Power of Online Gaming
The world of education is full of opportunities and different ways in which people can be taught, especially if educators and parents are open minded and prepared to try new methods. Online gaming has become a powerful tool for helping learners of all ages to engage with material that they may otherwise struggle to work with or may simple be boring.
From serious games that are specifically designed for learning to the integration of gamification elements into educational settings, there is boundless potential for online gaming to help enhance children’s problem-solving skills, ability to collaborate, be creative and so much more.
We’re going to explore a world beyond gaming as a source of entertainment, and as a method that can and ought to be used in both formal and informal education to unlock brand new avenues for immersive and interactive learning experiences.
Serious Games: Combining Learning and Play
The term “serious games” refers to a genre of video games that are specifically designed for educational purposes – they cover topics like science, math, history, geography and so much more.
Although these games are specifically for learning purposes, they make the process of learning fun. By embedding educational content within interactive gameplay, serious games offer children the opportunity to learn traditional content and topics in far more engaging and dynamic ways than ever before.
Serious games have become so popular in recent years that many already-popular franchises have started developing spin-off games in the genre. One great example of this is “Minecraft: Education Edition” which allows children to explore and create things in a virtual world, and in the process, they learn all about things like physics, coding, geometry and more. It helps teach children creativity, problem-solving skills and the ability to collaborate and think for themselves.
Gamification in Educational Settings
There are also ways in which elements of gaming have started to become integrated in traditional learning environments as a way in which to motivate and engage students in learning materials. It involves applying game design principles – things like levels, rewards and earning points – to learning contexts that don’t normally involve games. That way the process becomes more fun and in some cases, children are actually distracted from the fact that they’re learning because it becomes interactive.
A few methods of doing that include things like tracking progress so that learners have incentive to improve, acknowledging achievements and implementing leaderboards in classrooms and beyond to reinforce learning.
Other ways that teachers can do this is by creating quizzes, role-playing exercises and simulations to make lessons more interactive and memorable. Children tend to have a natural inclination to competition and challenge, so using games to take advantage of this in a positive and educational way ca help encourage active participation in the learning process.
Developing and Enhancing Skills Through Game Play
Traditional education often focuses on passive forms of learning. While there isn’t necessarily anything intrinsically wrong with that, it’s not always effective for all children. Things like repetition and memorising, gaming goes beyond the passive and actually encourages children to think and learn for themselves – it enables active engagement and critical thinking.
At the heart of the majority of games is problem solving and it comes in many different forms. Learners are presented with a problem and it’s up to them to figure out how to solve it. This has the potential to help them practice analytical thinking adapting to new situations and resilience too – real world skills, so to speak.
In some contexts, if they’re working in groups or with partners, they’ll also have the opportunity to learn to collaborate effectively with others. This is also great for communication and delegating in order to achieve a specific goal as a team.
The Potential Role of Game Play in Education
As much as the online pokies NZ offer have made an impact on the adult population, online gaming has also made a mark on education. There’s still a bright future and endless opportunities for the ways in which it can benefit learning. It has the potential to empower students beyond and addition to traditional education, allowing children to become more independent and to think for themselves.
Whether it’s games that are specifically designed for educational purposes or using gaming techniques in existing educational spaces, the possibilities are endless.