GAMES-BASED LEARNING

On Monday, we explored many different games you could use in the primary classroom. This has opened my eyes to the number of games that we can incorporate into our teaching to enhance the learning in the class. Children will have experienced many of the games before and some will be experts at them. It is important to not focus on the pupils who are the best at something as our aim in Curriculum for Excellence is to produce "Confident Individuals". I think the way to tackle this is to ask the pupils to keep personal targets in their tray or on a chart on the computer, where they can see the progress they are making. Using games-based learning is extremely motivating whereas:

The kids themselves are frustated by the wide gap between their exhilarating experiences playing games and their slow-paced lessons in schools (Prensky, M. 2006. intro)

Using games is an innovative way of closing down the gap between children's experiences at school and at home. As a child, I would love to have played Guitar Hero, played with ninetendo's, played Brain Gym...

Guitar Hero:

This is contextualised learning as the guitar can be used to link many areas of the curriculum together (e.g. Music, Literacy and English, Drama) to produce an exciting project. The stimulus of using a guitar would immediately engage the children in the lesson and make it active.

In a school in Aberdeen, the children were first of all asked to create their own "Rock Star". I found it interesting to watch the videos as they talked about their writing because they were all very enthusiastic, engaged and confident in their work. The children used their imagination enormously in their work. To watch their videos click here!

Guitar Hero has unlimited learning opportunities and I think games like this are definitely following the Curriculum for Excellence's aims of producing an enriched and child-centred curriculum (Lts, 2009).

I-Phone:

There are many apps available to download from the IPhone. I found some apps that I think would work very well in the nursery such as "Wheels on the bus" etc. Brain Teaser could be used individually in primaries.

I think the I-Phone has potential but I worry that children might not work collaboratively with them. However,when groups do work effectively I think that using Iphones will be good experience and will promote pupils teamwork and technological skills.

The IPhones could be used in many curricular areas in primaries: Mathematics, Language, Drama, Social Studies...

Wii Games:

We played Wii Music and Wii Cycling. I think that some games like cycling would not work well in a class as it would only allow one person to take part at a time. However, whilst discussing this with Sharon and Jennifer, we realised that some games have the potential to involce the whole class. I thought that Just Dance could be used as a Gym lesson with the game on a screen at the front or using the projector on the wall. Only two people could use the remotes, however, the rest of the class could also dance along. This game increases fitness, co-ordination, timing, gross motor skills and is a lot of fun! What more could children want!

I will end with a quote which sums up the purpose of Games-based learning:

Video and computer games are helping- not harming our kids.
The real reason they play so much is that their games are teaching them to succeed in the Twenty-first century (Prensky, M. 2006. no page)