Learning is not a toy for children
While the child is walking under the table, the tablet is part of his learning. Everyone happily shakes Toca Boca for the kids, helps them put the simplest puzzles with their finger, sing songs with it, move triangles back and forth. A person takes the first steps in science and the whole family is ready to applaud if he correctly sorts the mushrooms by color.
On another level, at the level of higher education, games work for humans again.
In universities today they study in a wide variety of simulators, and we are talking not only about pilots and surgeons - in these areas, the use of game realities is already familiar. Students conduct experiments in virtual laboratories, move the orbits of planets, control the reproduction of microorganisms, and conduct genetic experiments. Managers are taught to work with virtual groups of people, thus developing strategic thinking, and with it the skills of cooperation and leadership. Examples include the University of Virginia's Virtual Simulation Center or the Danish company Labster , which creates virtual science learning environments.
But when it comes to schoolchildren, the situation changes, and parents roll their eyes. Here games are directly opposed to learning. Either you are a good boy, sitting with a book, or you shoot at someone in the computer, and those around you consider you a lost person. Even media workers feel free to use synonyms like “ this misfortune”, And parental communities with might and main support the idiotic initiatives on prohibitions and restrictions. The buzz rose in 2018 when WHO added video game addiction to the list of diseases and disorders. How to define addiction? It's very simple: a diagnosis can be made if a person has problems with their studies due to games throughout the year. This formulation is bad, firstly, because thanks to it, any parent can diagnose normal children, because everybody has problems in school from time to time. Secondly, it again emphasizes the split: here the guys of the game are your spillikins, nonsense, but here, on the other hand, is a real education. Yes, the modern child spends much more time at the computer than the generations of his fathers and grandparents. And it happens that the game is really more interesting,than homework in Russian.
What's wrong with the lessons
Schooling and games are similar in many ways. Yes, the head teacher does not yet run in a latex overalls (it's a matter of time), however, both there and there we deal with systems in which there is a specific goal, a certain set of rules, and success, both personal and team, depends on loyalty and well-coordinated team actions.
However, there are also differences. The generation of children sitting with LC poppies grew up and sent the kids to high school. Right now it became obvious where the school is losing to standard education from the player's point of view.
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But what if you see educational potential in the game? What if we go beyond the linear school approach? If the advantages of games become a part of the educational process, and educational content is integrated into the virtual world so smoothly, that the same Maryvanna will recommend children to complete a mission with an assessment in the magazine?
What are the successes
These are not distant dreams. Innovative educators are bringing games to classroom learning, and educational games have entered the mobile app market.
Most of them are pretty dull. What's the trouble?
There are two approaches, connecting tutorial topics and play. The first is gamification. It should solve the problem of low motivation of students when performing routine activities, give it meaning and add awards, badges and achievements. For example, the successful mobile game Operation Math, is devoted to working out examples with the simplest arithmetic operations. The game shell helps a person to tune in the right way: now he is not adding three and four, but breaking the secret code in Sydney, because he is James Bond, and saving the world is at stake. The ticking timer adds excitement. But in fact, the child solves the same examples as in the notebook in the lesson. Popular games from Prodigy also work , but only in a fantastic setting and in the RPG genre. Your daughter can become a fairy who walks through a magical land. But in order to kill the dragon and defeat the sorcerer, she will have to solve all the time some examples that pop up next to the magic wand.
When the same manner of gamification, ordinary actions are adopted by the teacher in the classroom, everything turns out even worse. If a student is told that now he will select the correct prefixes for -z, -s in order to get gold and defeat the dragon, he may feel cheated. And you can't blame him for that.
Game education assumes a different approach: you need to offer children not a surrogate for games, not a fantastic shell, but real games with working and exciting mechanics. And already inside such games educational content is embedded. By the way a person goes through the game, it will be possible to tell how much he mastered the topic or mastered the skills.
Integrating gameplay and school content is a challenge for the near future. Industry giants are interested in such things. Epic Games has a digital Fortnite environment that is already being used for educational purposes. The MinecraftEdu platform is used by teachers from the USA and Scandinavian countries, and for studying different disciplines. History, geography, physics, chemistry, biology - a lot of subjects can be learned in such an environment. After all, it allows building a wide variety of models: cities of the past, the structure of man, the arrangement of molecules ...
The problems that arise before the creators of educational games are easily overcome. It is important to learn how to package educational content into a game so that people do not feel like they have been given a physics test.
It would be nice to keep track of what exactly the person learned in the game in terms of specific knowledge and competencies, to figure out how to provide feedback to the chemistry teacher or Vasya's parents. All the same, they will buy the game. They will also save on textbooks.
And the main thing is to turn to face the student and apply a subject-oriented approach. That is, when developing, think, starting from the psychological and intellectual tasks of a specific player, an eighth grade student. Primary here will not be the game, but the development and needs of a person. Teachers have already proclaimed this approach, but so far difficulties have arisen with implementation. In game design, all this should be somehow more cheerful.