This week's ICT topic was game based learning. It made me wonder how many things I had learned just by playing games. To be honest, I don't remember playing a lot of games in high school during classes. A few, yes, but not that many. For example, there was a Maths class where we had to figure out Mr. X's age and an English class where we had to solve riddles written in English. Game can be a lot of fun though and I can definitely remember lots of games I played between classes during breaks.
What do I think of game based learning?
I think game based learning can be very useful, but I can understand why so few of my teachers used it. Games require a lot of creativity and it's not easy to be that creative all the time. Plus, making a class fun or entertaining doesn't always mean creating a game for it. Also, does every single class really need to be fun?
Forgetting for a moment that fun is always subjective, a lot of us learned with more traditional classes and we didn't suffer or learn worse just because there weren't that many games in the classroom. I don't want to give the impression that I'm against game based learning because I'm not, but I think the activity needs to be planned very carefully or it will be too much even for the most enthusiastic students. Are games fun? Definitely! But are games fun all the time? Unfortunately no. Life would be so much better if they were.
Some ideas from the point of view of a student
Games are fun because we aren't playing all the time. If games become the standard in education, games may become utterly boring. I see them in the same way that I see holidays or desserts. They're very enjoyable at first and if they take place every now and then, but having them all the time doesn’t sound that great.
As I said, overdoing games isn't fun, not even for students. There are some days when everybody would rather sit in class just listening to the teacher than getting up and playing. I think this is something very important that teachers should keep in mind and I will definitely remember it once I start teaching. Being very enthusiastic about a game will not magically make students equally interested in it. Alternatively, that a few students don't seem to be enjoying the activity at all and just want to be left alone doesn't mean the game is a complete failure and nobody should take it personally. I remember camp-like games that took place during a school trip where the people who had created these games were far too active in trying to get us to enjoy their games. The result was that some of us started to strongly dislike them and not just their games. They were essentially ordering us to have fun, which is really silly if you stop to think about it.
In general, I think game based learning is a great idea to do something different and even have fun, but only if it's well planned and not overdone. After all, I doubt that it's a good idea that students start associating games with boredom.
What about you? Did your classes include games? Have you used games in your classes? Feel free to let me know in the comments.
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