Loading...

Game-Based Learning!

Loading...

Loading...

By: Donald Beaulieu

What is game-based learning?

Game-based learning and gamification is taking an educational topic and integrating game play components that create a learning activity that is more engaging and helps motivate students to learn so that they can play the game itself, track progress, and feel rewarded for their learning.

Game-Based Learning

Gamification

Teaches curriculum content through playing games.

Purposeful selection of a game with the intent of teaching a specific outcome.

Adding game like components to your course to help with engagement.

Rewards are used to help monitor progress and are used in place of a grade scale.

Is intrinsically rewarding for the most part, but can also be extrinsically rewarding as well.

Extrinsically rewarding as it relies on the reward itself.

Examples: Playing monopoly to learn about money, playing with Jenga blocks to learn about physics, or using anatomy arcade to help identify muscles and bones.

Examples: Gold stars for completing work or answering questions, setting daily step goals that you track on your watch, or receiving badges for completing specific tasks.

Using it in the classroom

"Involves designing learning activities so that game characteristics and game principles inhere within the learning activities themselves. For example, in an Economics course, students might compete in a virtual stock-trading competition; in a Political Science course, students might role-play as they engage in mock negotiations involving a labour dispute." (University of Waterloo 2022)

Game-based learning is constantly evolving. Traditionally a teacher may have just created a trivia game such as Jeopardy, then it progressed to interactive trivia games like Kahoot, and has continued to evolve leading to the development of fully immersive games like Prodigy. "In the past five years, the Ontario-based company Prodigy Game has grown sales by 9,230 percent and now has more than 5 million active monthly users in the United States and Canada" (Wise 2019).