Thesis Reflection - Games and Education

One benefit of games in education is that they encourage active learning. Active learning is a way of making learning authentic and it encourage students to participate in the lesson trough discovery, processing and applying new information as defined by Van De Bogart (2009) cited in (Milczynski, 2010).

But what does make games so engaging? According to MacKenty (2006) as cited in (Milczynski, 2010) “it’s the act of problem solving that makes games so engaging… devoid of challenge or risk of failure, games really aren’t all that much fun”.

In addition, MacKenty (2006) and Harris (2009) as cited in (Milczynski, 2010) both agree that if an educational game is well designed, students can build their problem-solving skills while having fun no matter the genre of the game.

In order to have a successful engaging educational game one must create a game suitable for students to be fun by challenging them.

An interesting question I came across while reading Milczynski (2010) literature review is of Rotter (2004) where he asks, “If a pupil didn’t already study and learn the information, is there any way to get the answer during the game?”.

This is e very intersting question and fluded my mind with different ideas. Where the game would be in such a way that the player can choose his own difficulty like in Dark Souls Two mad by Bandai Namco (2017). In Dark Souls II the player is able to chose the dificulty from the wepon chosen and in the education game, there might be portals which puts the player to the test to access a certain dificulty while if you did not reach that level yet you can go to a lower level to learn the needed skills.

References

Bandai Namco, 2017. Dark Souls II. [Online] Available at: http://www.darksoulsii.com/us/ [Accessed 18 January 2017].

Milczynski, K. A., 2010. Literature Review: Effectiveness of Gaming in the Classroom. [Online] Available at: https://msu.edu/~milczyn1/artifacts/LITERATUREREVIEW_KAREN_MILCZYNSKI.pdf [Accessed 18 January 2017].