EDUCATING CHILDREN THROUGH GAME MAKING ACTIVITY (original) (raw)
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Exploring the Educational Value of Children's Game Authoring Practices: A Primary School Case Study
In todays technologically advancing world, computer games have become an important part of children's lives. Educators started to see the power of this new medium and explore ways to use computer games to support learning within schools. There are many references in research literature about computer based games having a varied impact on learning, however not many studies have looked into educational value of students designing their own games. Where learning through games seems to be the most important focus point, learning about games is not seen as being as valuable. Whilst educators endeavour to achieve goals in maths, science and literacy using games and other technology, the potential of gaining transferable skills that will support students to perform better in other areas of learning has been overlooked. In this study the educational value of children authoring games was explored and the skills students developed during the game design process investigated. A mixed method approach was adopted, where a qualitative research method was used together with a quantitative method to explore the educational value of children's game authoring activities. Individual interviews, observations, children's written game designs and finally completed games were used to understand the context around students' game design activities. A survey was used to collect background data about the participants' gaming experiences. The result of this study shows that the children had opportunities to develop some invaluable skills, which are transferable to any area of learning such as; communication, critical thinking, advanced technology skills and working collaboratively. The game design process itself represented the aspects of creativity where children used their ideas and imagination to make games. However this study did not aim to reflect on the impact of transferable skills on actual learning.
A reflective study into children's cognition when making computer games
In this paper, children's mental activities when making digital games are explored. Where previous studies have mainly focused on children's learning, this study aimed to unfold the children's thinking process for learning when making computer games. As part of an ongoing larger scale study, which adopts an ethnographic approach, this research reports on how children think when making their own computer games using their “Thinking Maps” and video recordings of group discussions. A model for Thinking for Learning, “think-to-learn-to-think,” is discussed and children's activities are used to define the stages of this cycle. The study of children's pre–during–after project “Thinking Maps” and explanations during group discussions suggests that their thinking sequences were altered during and after their game design activities. The children presented their “thinking process” when designing computer games as a continual circular cycle and described their mind as a virtual lab to plan and visualise solutions before testing them on screen, using the “Alice” game design program.
Conhecimento & Diversidade
This article explores the writing of educational games, outlining the key elements of games and their methodologies for selecting educational content. The aim is to consider how to write educational games, utilizing a literature review methodology. The instructional approaches, traditional and alternative, form a polarized narrative, leading to reflection on the best way to adapt educational games to the curriculum. The traditional approach teaches the elaboration of instructional objectives before the design of educational games. The alternative approach proposes a storytelling-based model for selecting instructional content. Stories are created by emotional conflicts and interests, using these conflicts to create a narrative of antagonists favors engagement and meaningful learning. Appropriate technical tools employed in the creation of educational games should always be studied, aiming at the efficiency of game design and the effectiveness of learning. The main conclusion of this...
Social, Education, and Psychological Issues, 2014
Play has been an informal approach to teach young ones the skills of survival for centuries. With advancements in computing technology, many researchers believe that computer games1 can be used as a viable teaching and learning tool to enhance a student’s learning. It is important that the educational content of these games is well designed with meaningful game-play based on pedagogically sound theories to ensure constructive learning. This chapter features theoretical aspects of game design from a pedagogical perspective. It serves as a useful guide for educational game designers to design better educational games for use in game-based learning. The chapter provides a brief overview of educational games and game-based learning before highlighting theories of learning that are relevant to educational games. Selected theories of learning are then integrated into conventional game design practices to produce a set of guidelines for educational games design.
Create Digital Games for Education: Game Design as a Teaching Methodology
ICERI Proceedings, 2020
Besides the pure application of serious games as tools for knowledge transfer, a further trend has been observed in the last few years: The creation of games as an opportunity to gain practical experience and thereby also build up valuable knowledge. In this context several approaches are possible, such as using paper prototyping, game maker tools like Scratch, RPG-Maker, Construct 3 or Game Maker Studio 2, and the application of actual game engines like Unity. This contribution aims to discuss the possibility of creating games in a very specific, predefined genre using game maker tools that have been especially developed for use in an educational context and therefore offer didactic guidance. The Game Creator Tool which was developed as part of the Erasmus+ project Create Digital Games for Education (CDG4E) is presented in more depth. Using this tool, one can create decision card games inspired by the mobile game bestseller "Reigns". Within the project, the consortium created educational games in different areas such as fake news prevention and STEM education. In addition to these ready-made games, another focus was placed on using the tool itself as a teaching technique, for example to create games on a specific topic with school classes or within youth work, but also as an instrument for setting up dedicated "game jams". This contribution reports on the advantages and drawbacks of creating the tool itself by analysing qualitative and quantitative data gathered during the iterative design process of the Game Creator.
Towards Creative Pedagogy: Empowering Students to Develop Games
Due to social, economic, and technological changes in our society creativity is nowadays seen as basic survival and success factor. Thus, innovation, creativity and production of media should be emphasized also in the school of the future. However, current schooling system tends to produce consumers of media instead of creative problem solvers, critical thinkers, and producers of media. At this point also educators and policy makers should be creative and introduce innovative learning solutions and practices that support the development of creativity and 21 century skills. This paper replies to this call by considering learning by developing games as one of future learning strategies. Learning by developing games is not totally new idea, but the research has only begun to explore the possibilities that this pedagogical strategy provides. In this article we introduce a new game authoring environment MAGOS that is developed according to the framework of creative pedagogy. The framework of creative pedagogy comprises of three interrelated elements of creative teaching, teaching for creativity, and creative learning. From these three elements we derived eight design principles that guided the development of MAGOS environment. MAGOS supports creative teaching practices by providing different tools for planning and for teacher participation. Teaching for creativity is supported by offering an imaginative and innovative learning environment and tools with which a teacher can support students' creative and constructive processes. MAGOS include multiple elements that promote students' collaborative game development that is supposed to enhance co-creation of knowledge. MAGOS requires a joint effort for game development and enables building on each others' ideas through sharing and remixing other students' existing work. MAGOS also provides a tool that helps students to generate novel ideas for their joint game development.
2020 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE), 2020
Research and full paper. Digital games are increasingly a part of our daily lives and are already considered teaching and learning tools. However, its production and documentation is a very complicated task that requires programming skills and knowledge from different areas. This has hampered the development of games in the classroom environment. On the other hand, some teachers have proposed this activity to enable their students to learn school content in a more meaningful way and, consequently, improve learning rates. An alternative for the adoption of game-based learning is an unplugged approach for creating games based on natural language, in which students learn the fundamentals of computing in a playful way and without the use of computers. In this context, this article presents an approach that proposes the creation of games in an unplugged way by using texts produced by students, thus favoring the development of computational thinking and reading and writing skills in the c...
Exploring the Use of Game Making Across the School Curriculum
INTED2017 Proceedings, 2017
Computer games as part of education is a well-established topic for research, suggesting that creating games is linked to a range of cognitive and behavioural outcomes. Creating games in all subject disciplines is becoming increasingly possible due to the increasingly higher status of computing in schools across Europe and the prevalence of visual programming languages such as Scratch and Pocket Code. The use of games within education is not new; in a systematic review of 129 papers [1] found that playing games impacts across a range of areas including engagement, cognitive ability and, most commonly, knowledge acquisition and content understanding. However, while research has thus far examined game play and game based learning in education there is limited work focussing on the process of game creation as a method of classroom teaching. This is a prospect which is increasingly possible with the introduction of visual programming languages such as Scratch [2] and Pocket Code. It is suggested that playful learning through computer games could stimulate students' intrinsic motivation ([3] and that knowledge creation can emerge through the construction of artefacts in a playful learning environment via the co-creation of games [4]. The research presented in this paper is from a pilot study examining the impact of game making in traditional primary and secondary school classrooms (5-18 years) in the United Kingdom (UK). The research, funded by Horizon 2020, is part of a wider European project; No-one Left Behind. In the UK the project has introduced game making into disciplines such as Religious Education, Science and History. Data indicates that although not all students found this a positive experience, computational thinking skills have increased, and students, disaffected with their learning, have re-engaged with learning, increasing their persistence and resulting in a deeper understanding of subject knowledge. In addition initial results suggest that game making has the potential to increase engagement with classroom learning and lead to increased learner satisfaction within lessons. Non-computing teachers have gained in confidence in developing game creation in their subject discipline, increasing their awareness of computational thinking. Barriers identified include teacher familiarity with programming as a means to teach non-STEM subject knowledge, a potential to decrease knowledge acquisition during the process of familiarisation with the teaching tool and a need for software developers to consider design for children with SEND. The project is changing the learning environment and emerging pedagogy has been identified which will be shared in this paper. As a result of the study lesson resources have been created for teachers to use across disciplines which are now available via the project URL; these will be shared in this paper.