Games in Education

Describe the Instructional Technology Trend.

Games are an effective way to develop students' problem-solving and critical-thinking skills. They present several attributes in their favor, including: They provide an environment in which students can try new things without fear of getting a bad grade; a well-designed game that's fun can keep students engaged for longer than a traditional lesson; games are designed to force players to master a skill, then have them call upon that skill later in order to progress and learn additional skills players will need later.  

How do you think this trend is going to impact learning/education?

Today's generation of teachers grew up playing video games. It's only natural they would want to find ways to incorporate gaming into their teaching. The ubiquity of technology has made game-based learning more feasible than at any other time in history. I think there's a lot of overlap between game-based learning and mobile learning, taking advantage of phones and touchscreens. If there's one thing that Angry Birds has shown us, it's that a game doesn't need to have an enormous budget, or be overly complicated, to be fun to play. A game can be simple and still exercise students' problem-solving capabilities.

As an instructional technologist, what do you need to do to keep up with this trend?

First and foremost, I think I would need to play as many games as I can, both educational and noneducational. I'd play the educational games to see how other educators are incorporating content into the game environment, and I'd play noneducational games to see what games are the most fun, then try to see if there would be any ways to create something similar in an educational context.

Provide two resources for reading that provide more information on this trend and explain why these readings stood out to you.

• Digital game-based learning: This article is produced by LEARN NC, a K-12 educational outreach group I used to work for. This is actually one of the first articles I ever read on game-based learning (note that the sources it cites are fairly old). That said, I think it mostly still holds up, and it covers areas such as using games for special-needs students. I found it a very good starting point for further research.
• The GameIT Handbook: Pretty much what it sounds like, this is a handbook for using games in the classroom. It covers everything from a basic introduction to game-based learning, to what the future holds for educational games.

A Video from the web about the trend

http://www.ted.com/talks/gabe_zichermann_how_games_make_kids_smarter

Re-use information that you shared for your main post in the discussion forum (educreation, voki etc)