Requires individuality in its creation.

When i was a Management Consultant, I used games as ice breakers and also a subtle learn or experience or simulation learn in higher level executives, who always feel that sitting in a learning session is boring.

For my students in the college, i fine tune the game so that they relate and associate their learning with the game so that they can recollect their learning for applications in real-life situation and also in exams.

People involved in teaching are notoriously averse to get out of their comfort zone. However, gamification is making inroads in teaching, mainly in new paradigms like MOOCs and project-based learning.

During pre-service teacher training courses,  a number of teaching strategies such as discussion, demonstration, lecturing ,activity , use of games are taught and demonstrated by the teacher educators and practiced by the trainees. But after joining the profession, they mostly use lecture, discussion or activity performing .Some of the reasons can be; lack of time for completion of course, lack of facilities for use of games,problem of class discipline during the use of games(this problem is raised by the administrators many a time), nature of many concepts restricting use of games and fear of the teachers that in some cases use of games can lead to misconceptions, especially  while teaching science concepts phenomena, principles, facts etc.

 r s sindhu 

Thanks for the contribution Sindhu. I also believe that despite the games present great contribution to teaching , time is a limiting factor . Here in Brazil still consider parental resistance.

Thanks Krishnan and Juan, the gamification is really a interesting tool to teaching learning. However this is a great challenge to us professors.

For me, teaching is all about structure. We all do things in everyday life in sequences. Even simple things like eating, bathing, etc. all have sequential steps. Learning is no different. I employ structure, sequence, and purposeful opportunities for learning. Games and gaming are built into my structure. I approach it very holistically. I'm not near as concerned about whether or not I run short on time. I believe the whole matters more than the parts, which is why time is not a factor for me. The structure of the whole is what brings authenticity to the learning. Structure, sequencing, and purposeful planning is what makes the games a very positive thing to embed in my teaching. 

Dear Claudia. It's very good question.

In my opinion, games are still little used in classrooms because the educational system separates education from entertainment. Apparently, the educational system does not understand that we can learn, and in fact is what really lasts, when we play, when we had fun. Hence, school failure and many other negative aspects that the education system then attempts to correct. It is pure incoherence, but in it we move.

Thanks!

por el propio diseño del sistema educativo que no los tiene en cuenta en las guías docentes

There are many projects I've read about that promote using games, even normal games for various purposes:

https://minecraftedu.com

At least in Germany the situation is as follows: The topics are mainly decided upon by the government. Simply put, most people employed there do not have actual teaching experience and oftentimes not even proper education in the field. Since, as a teacher, you're bound to the curriculum, it is very hard to deploy serious games in classrooms.

Simply put, I think the government is at fault here, since the methods being used are often antiquated.

Furthermore, many schools simply lack the funds to use games. In most schools you only have one computer room, which is obviously not sufficient to allow using computers during class for longer time spans.

However, for higher education, especially in computer sciences, I see more and more Universities using computer games as projects to teach, for example, coding.

I do not agree with Paul here, I don't think its somebodies fault only because that someone (here the government) handles a sensitive aspect as teaching children light hearted. From our own perspective (we actually do some work on gamification and I currently have one PhD working in this area), imho I would say we still don't know enough to seriously apply games in a structured way at large scale in any curriculum. If you look at the available sources and research, yes there are many, but what you find is a lot of positiv and negative examples with limited scope.

What is missing in terms of a thoughtful didactically sound application is a somehow integrative model of learning goals and matching game principles backed-up seriously by enough empirical evidence. Something which usually can be accepted to be taught in didactic classes to your teachers.

In addition, we have a serious lack of tools to put this into practice. Even given the acclaimed sophisticated game engines of today, I can't imagine a typical school teacher to just apply these to build some serious game. These engines are much to general in their target  (or to specific targeting one game genre) and do not offer the content one would need as an absolute beginner to do something useful in a short time with it. Keep in mind, we might be talking about people for which computer science might be analogous from their option of view to using Word or Excel. That of course is an extreme exaggeration. But from my experience I have learned that computer scientists have the tendency to often overstimate their users in terms of their technical skills. And this does not say, that they should have these skills in the first place. But in a typical working day of a teacher, where do you want to include another long term training in using game engines to model own content? Even given, we would know about the didactical principles behind it. 

Marc raises an interesting point. Who has to create the content?

Personally, I would say this is NOT a teachers jobs. They have a god awful workload and should not have to create games. Let's be honest here, who would like to play a game made by someone without the slightest education in the field?

I stand by my point, if the government would decide that more games should be used in schools, then suddenly there would be funding. There are plenty companies working on educational games and I think suddenly more companies would be interested in the topic. Just like school books, the content would have to be chosen and created in a fashion which matches the curriculum.

A teacher's job should be to pick the relevant "games" from a pool of acquired ones and determine which ones are relevant for the upcoming lessons. While there might be the special case of some teacher creating all their materials themselves, all the teachers I know use some tasks from supplementary books and similar sources. Educational games can certainly be deployed in the same fashion.

Nonetheless, currently there is not enough content, as Marc said. So that might also be one case why it's not being widely used.

Hi everyone, hi Paul and Marc,

being both a researcher in the field of serious games (SG) and a practitioner (my company Korion developed a few SG, among them a company simulation for schools called "learn2work") my impression is as follows: in spite of established didactic principles, education still is a highly personal thing. There are teachers and professors who want to test new things and others who prefer to stick to their established tools and methods.

In contrast to business, there is hardly pressure by competition; thus innovation is optional unless "ordered" by the curriculum. As a result there are educators using SG, but they are a minority.

The reson why others are reluctant, from my experience, is that they do not like the openness of games: if you run a simulation game with 12 groups, each one might have a different experience and also different results. It is tough and demanding to bring that all together, especially in comparison to a "lean back experience" like an educational film. So SG will probably remain an exception in teaching unless they are integrated in the "mainstream", i.e. the curricula.

In addition to the above mentioned issues I would like to add: Lack of suitable games.

We need shorter games that can tell a story/demonstrate a princinple in 20-30 minutes, not 3-30 hours. 

We need games that are translated into diffrent languages so that kids can play in their first language. 

We need games and/or worksheets for games that specifically adress local learning outcomes

Yet another pragmatic reason is that many teachers, like most professionals, are understandably conservative when it comes to change their good, old trusted methods, in which they invested a lot of time and effort, and to which they are already very familiar. Without a strong (school) incentive to change/improve, few teachers are likely to jump in.

I think this is a very interesting question. Yet the answer is manifold and complex. I was professional game designer, I am a teacher and my research focus is education. When looking back at my experience over the last years with serious games and gamification I see a good reason why serious games are not widely successful in the class room. Beside the teacher arguments already given I think there are more general issues with learning games.

1) If they are declared games they have to compete with games made with a billion dollar budget. Most serious games are plain bad. They are not fun to play.

2) Not every student likes games. Especially in higher education students do not necessary like to play games.

3) There is a fundamental misconception about games in education. SGs artificially add incentives to to learning goal. A primitive example would be you get achievements for doing your homework, a more complex example a 3D virtual world to learn English. Both share the same problem the incentive is bound to the game. This is not an issue for players they can just stop playing and play something else but learners to not have this luxury.

Teacher as far as my experience goes may not be able to formalize their skepticism but have an intuition about this and therefore tend to shy away from this medium. To solve this issue we as game designers might need to change our perspective.

Games are fun because of the LEARNING that happens within them. Take chess as an example the fun of playing chess comes from mastering the rules and being able to manipulate the game world (chess board) in a pleasing (winning) way. This is a long learning process. The same goes for all extremely successful games. Like diablo, bejeweled, Minecraft, World of Warcraft. They all make it easy for players to learn the rules of the game to manipulate the game world to their liking. 

If we want to use game design to enhance teaching we might be better of to concentrate on how to explain students how our teaching can enable them in changing their game world aka life. We do not need fancy graphics to do that we just need to change the incentive structure of our teaching and games are a very good source of inspiration how that may work. 

Cheers,

 Markus

Markus, your contribution was very important for me. Thank you.

One of my master students, developed research in the past year, about the games use. His find out that the teacher think the games are one powerfull tool for the education, however they no use the games in classroom.

This contradiction has left me uneasy.

Profa Claudia Barin, this is a interesting question. Although there is a shortage of published studies with scientific evidence in some areas, such as in Human Anatomy, alternative and complementary methods already point out their importance in the training of students. Example, for the study of anatomy we must use several teaching methods in combination. When it comes to human anatomy, the importance of the student's contact with the corpse is widely recognized. However, other resources should be included as a complementary method, such as board games, which we use with students of the medical sciences at the University of Pernambuco - Petrolina, and we can see the increase in interest and help in meaningful student learning, besides impact on the training of future professionals more critical and reflective. This year we launched an article about the construction of these board games with materials of low cost (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316940133_NEUROGAME_An_Alternative_and_Complementary_Method_in_the_Teaching_and_Learning_Process_of_Neuroanatomy?_iepl%5Bcontexts%5D%5B0%5D=searchReact&_iepl%5BviewId%5D=7NgUi5UpSPpnRlng1DD6z8S0fC9RIyKXUJCg&_iepl%5BsearchType%5D=publication&_iepl%5Bdata%5D%5BcountLessEqual20%5D=1&_iepl%5Bdata%5D%5BinteractedWithPosition1%5D=1&_iepl%5BtargetEntityId%5D=PB%3A316940133&_iepl%5BinteractionType%5D=publicationTitle)  and developed a research study to evaluate the acceptance and effectiveness of this method in the practical teaching of Neuroanatomy (Neurogame). This latest study will be published shortly that show excellent results and highlights the great potential of these methods to improve the training of students in their respective fields of study.

Best regards,

Fernando Ribeiro.

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