Introduction:
The biggest obstacle to improving education today is a lack of engagement and motivation in the classroom. To address this challenge it is imperative to ascertain what does motivate and engage students today so that those aspects can be brought into the classroom. Most people would agree that one of the most motivating and engaging aspects of student life is playing games. Many students frequently spend hours playing games with their friends or glued to one type of screen or another. Most sources estimate that on average people spend about 2 hours per day on games, and that most youth are well above this average. Capturing this energy to improve engagement and motivation would significantly improve classroom learning. Currently …show more content…
The premise of both methods is to utilize those aspects of games that students find most interesting and utilize them to make the learning process more relevant, meaningful, and effective. Both methods are generally effective at increasing engagement and motivation within the classroom for two reasons. First they tend to capture student interest and re-associate learning with fun activities, and second they transition the classroom environment from using passive teacher lead learning to an active student driven learning. Much of this is done by changing the expectations and rewards with increased choices and more effective positive feedback. Making choices involves a degree of emotional commitment and investment. As these choices are validated with positive feedback the student is further encouraged to buy into the activities and experiences and repeat the process. Each cycle of the process increases the level of commitment and investment and as long as these choices are allowed to continue and the students’ interests are rewarded and satisfied, the commitment and investment level will continue to increase. To maintain this process, students need to be actively making choices as opposed to passively listening. For these reasons both methods strongly favor a classroom environment driven by students actively inquiring or discovering rather than the …show more content…
One of the primary limitations of Game-based learning is the various expertise required to produce a quality product. Requiring many people to produce even simple games this method is limited to corporations that usually need to recover their costs of production. The other major limitation is that these products are rarely customizable to specific curriculum instruction within a classroom. The advantage of this is that it is largely “plug and play” without requiring any modification to the course itself or the means of instruction to incorporate. The strength of this method is its ability to differentiate and scaffold experiences to customize learning far better than classroom experiences are capable of. This mode of learning also lends itself to learning at a higher level using complex interconnected modeling systems. Gamification can be done by individuals with little or no specific expertise to modify just about any existing activity, but it also usually requires customization for each individual situation. Because of the ease of application Gamification is more of a grass roots
The biggest obstacle to improving education today is a lack of engagement and motivation in the classroom. To address this challenge it is imperative to ascertain what does motivate and engage students today so that those aspects can be brought into the classroom. Most people would agree that one of the most motivating and engaging aspects of student life is playing games. Many students frequently spend hours playing games with their friends or glued to one type of screen or another. Most sources estimate that on average people spend about 2 hours per day on games, and that most youth are well above this average. Capturing this energy to improve engagement and motivation would significantly improve classroom learning. Currently …show more content…
The premise of both methods is to utilize those aspects of games that students find most interesting and utilize them to make the learning process more relevant, meaningful, and effective. Both methods are generally effective at increasing engagement and motivation within the classroom for two reasons. First they tend to capture student interest and re-associate learning with fun activities, and second they transition the classroom environment from using passive teacher lead learning to an active student driven learning. Much of this is done by changing the expectations and rewards with increased choices and more effective positive feedback. Making choices involves a degree of emotional commitment and investment. As these choices are validated with positive feedback the student is further encouraged to buy into the activities and experiences and repeat the process. Each cycle of the process increases the level of commitment and investment and as long as these choices are allowed to continue and the students’ interests are rewarded and satisfied, the commitment and investment level will continue to increase. To maintain this process, students need to be actively making choices as opposed to passively listening. For these reasons both methods strongly favor a classroom environment driven by students actively inquiring or discovering rather than the …show more content…
One of the primary limitations of Game-based learning is the various expertise required to produce a quality product. Requiring many people to produce even simple games this method is limited to corporations that usually need to recover their costs of production. The other major limitation is that these products are rarely customizable to specific curriculum instruction within a classroom. The advantage of this is that it is largely “plug and play” without requiring any modification to the course itself or the means of instruction to incorporate. The strength of this method is its ability to differentiate and scaffold experiences to customize learning far better than classroom experiences are capable of. This mode of learning also lends itself to learning at a higher level using complex interconnected modeling systems. Gamification can be done by individuals with little or no specific expertise to modify just about any existing activity, but it also usually requires customization for each individual situation. Because of the ease of application Gamification is more of a grass roots