Distinctions between games and learning: A review of the literature on games in education (original) (raw)
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Concepts of Educational Design for Serious Games
2009
This paper focuses on the challenges related to the development of an educational design for serious games. This paper is based on the project Serious Games on a Global Market Place (2007)(2008)(2009)(2010) founded by the Danish Council for Strategic Research, in which an online game-based platform for English, as foreign language in primary school, and a learning game for social science in secondary school are connected. This paper presents an ongoing development of a concept of an educational design for serious games. This educational design integrates theories within learning, didactics, games, play, communication, multimodality and different pedagogical approaches.
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.
Serious Games: A New Paradigm for Education?
2011
This chapter explores the context for the new paradigm of learning emerging in education, in relation to key critical concepts that centre around gamification, immersion, interface and social interactivity. The chapter provides an extensive literature review as part of the context for the paradigm shift, including considering serious games and gamification, and social learning as key constructs for considering the changes to educational practices and infrastructure faced by educationalists and instructors over the coming years. The chapter also provides an historical background section and highlights some of the conceptual work that has been done already to frame the changes, firstly in relation to the notion of ‘gamification’ through the lens of an historical overview of serious games and secondly in a section exploring the need for an overall model for serious game design based upon four models and frameworks developed in past research work including the four dimensional framework, exploratory learning model, multimodal interface architecture model and the game-based learning framework. The chapter aims to set out the key conceptual territory for serious game design and bring together the main theoretical areas under consideration for future development of effective serious game content.
Designing serious games for education: from pedagogical principles to game mechanisms
Proceeedings of the 5th Eur. Conf, on game-based learning ECGBL, 2011
Serious Games represent an important opportunity for improving education thanks to their ability to compel players and to present realistic simulations of real-life situations. The scientific community is aware that we are just at the beginning of a proper use of gaming technologies for education and training and, in particular, there is a need for scientific and engineering methods for building games not only as more realistic simulations of the physical world, but as means that provide effective learning experiences. This requires an ever closer cooperation among the various actors involved in the overall SG life-chain, putting pedagogy in a central role, given the educational target of the SGs. This paper addresses the till-now inadequate integration of educational and game design principles and proposes techniques, methods and mechanisms that allow designers with different background to dialogue among each other and to define games that are able to integrate – by design – entertainment and educational features. In particular, the paper follows a design path that starts from the definition of reference frameworks and then analyses the typical categories of design patterns, before focusing on the user-interaction modalities – seen from a pedagogical point of view – given their relevance for the end-users. In the end, we discuss the sandbox serious game model, that looks suited to implement joint pedagogical and entertainment features. We believe that the indications provided in this paper can be useful for researchers and stakeholders to understand the typical issues in SG design and to get inspiration about possible solutions that take into account the need to implement tools that are effective both as an entertainment medium and as an education tool.
Editorial. Digital games and learning
Journal on Educational Technology, 2019
This special issue aims to increase the body of knowledge and evidence concerning the learning potential of video games and gamification, as well as the problems associated with educational uses of games (Persico, Passarelli, Dagnino, Manganello, Earp, & Pozzi, 2019). The selection of papers presented here has been informed by this overarching aim. At the same time, we hope that educators planning to employ games in their classes will find that they provide inspiring examples of educational uses of games. Since designing appropriate and pedagogically sound game-based learning interventions is a difficult endeavour, we do hope that the following articles will contribute to dissipate the fog that often envelops design principles for Game-Based Learning.
Serious Games for education and training
International Journal of Serious Games, 2014
Serious Games (SGs) are gaining an ever increasing interest for education and traning. Exploiting the latest simulation and visualization technologies, SGs are able to contextualize the player’s experience in challenging, realistic environments, supporting situated cognition. However, we still miss methods and tools for effectively and deeply infusing pedagogy and instruction inside digital games. After presenting an overview of the state of the art of the SG taxonomies, the paper introduces the pedagogical theories and models most relevant to SGs and their implications on SG design. We also present a schema for a proper integration of games in education, supporting different goals in different steps of a formal education process. By analyzing a set of well-established SGs and formats, the paper presents the main mechanics and models that are being used in SG designs, with a particular focus on assessment, feedback and learning analytics. An overview of tools and models for SG desi...
Game based learning -a different perspective
Video game use in education has focused on the application of games within the existing education system and on their inherent potential for producing learning (Gee 2003). However, research has revealed a fundamental mismatch between the goals of games and the object of school-based learning . As a result, efforts to integrate games into the curriculum have frequently fallen flat despite the best intentions of teachers and the gaming industry. Such efforts have failed either because games designed to educate do not engage their intended audience, or because truly engaging games do not provide enough educational value.
Handbook of the Learning Sciences (2nd Ed.), 2014
Video games are one of the most promising innovations in the world of learning. From simple puzzle-based mobile games to sprawling massively-multiplayer worlds, games of all shapes and sizes provide opportunities for players to interact with complex environments, master sophisticated content, develop skills for social interaction, and build 21 st century skills. Over the last decade, interest in videogames as a learning technology has grown from a few lone scholars in education and one popular book (Gee, 2006) to a welldeveloped scholarly domain with established lines of inquiry, peer-reviewed journals and community events. Across multiple existing disciplines including educational technology, literacy, science education, computer science, and design, a number of universities and colleges have established game programs in research, design and development: Harvard University, Dartmouth, New York University, University of Southern California, Carnegie Mellon University, MIT, and University of Wisconsin-Madison to name a few. Such programs have made significant inroads into the design of games and game-based environments to improve cognition and learning. As pressure on schools to educate efficiently and assess frequently increase, games have emerged as a leading potential technological solution to interactive, immersive learning and formative, diagnostic assessment at scale.