[RE]LEARN 2020 - The Learning Innovation Festival

Screens have become part of our daily life, trying to limit screen time for children increasing seems like a futile battle. Having said that, concerns around screen time are legitimate and have been around even before COVID-19. The only difference is that we’re at a point where these screens are where we work, learn, play and probably the only window that we will have to the outside world for the next few months. So the first thing parents need to do is accept that these screens are part of their children’s lives. Their focus should be on developing best practices and helping their kids stick to them.

Children are often completely immersed in games, losing all sense of time and space but when it comes to learning, parents don’t see the same level of interest from their kids. With online mediums becoming the main way children are taught in these times, teachers and parents around the world are struggling to maintain students’ attention towards learning.

What if we could apply the same technology approaches and techniques used by the most popular video games to education, turning learning into children’s favourite new game?

How Game Based Learning can be a Reward, Not a Task

Anxiety with studying is often attributed to students’ dislike of the subject, but it is actually tied to their frustrations with the way it is taught. In a recent study, 68% of students surveyed said they’d like the subject more if they understood how to apply what they learn to their daily lives.

This points to a need for conceptual learning, which involves teaching a subject based on broader principles or concepts that can later be applied to a variety of specific examples, then continually repeated to reinforce the learning. So why not use gaming as a way to apply this approach to teaching different subject?

Educational gaming has been around for decades, but with digital games becoming more popular now than ever before, this is a golden opportunity for educators and parents. According to a recent study, 74 per cent of teachers report using digital games for instruction and of those, 71 per cent report that game-based learning has been effective in improving their students’ mathematics learning. Games have the power to change learning from an act of passively receiving information to an active pursuit of it. Unlike a normal lesson, a fun yet challenging game makes learners want to come back and play every day. This repetition helps them retain the knowledge they have acquired and creates a foundation for them to build upon in the future.