Educational Games
This week we spoke about educational games and we felt about the use of them within the classroom. Since my power was out during Monday’s class I decided I would write about my opinion on educational games in the classroom since I was unable to share.
Educational games are a great way to keep students excited to practice their skills. I believe they are definitely a great resource but I do not believe they are necessarily the best way to teach students new skills. I have played a couple educational games alongside students which seemed to do really well at helping students practice their skills but not understand them, which is totally okay. I think as long as teachers use this resource as something the students can practice with then it will work really well. I do however believe it is important to leave the actual teaching to the teachers. I have never played a multiplayer educational game but I imagine this could distract from the actual learning and have students focus more on the competition aspect.
I think one of the best subjects to introduce educational games into is math. Math games can be fun as they are often fast-paced and have students choosing between multiple different answers. I have played one with a student before where there were math questions at the top and there were different answers falling from the sky and the student had to try and shoot at them quickly enough so that they wouldn’t hit the ground. The more questions the student got right the faster the game got. This game was great as we were only supposed to try out the game for a couple minutes but the student enjoyed it so much that we continued playing for about twenty minutes. As mentioned in my previous paragraph, this game was great for practice but did not go over any answers the student got wrong therefore not encouraging understanding more just focussing on practicing.
Another point I wanted to mention was that some classrooms may simply not have access to these tools to help students practice so relying on this method of skill-building is not necessarily versatile. I appreciate the idea behind educational games but they can lead to students without access to feel left out. I believe if you are unable to supply all your students with the resources to use such technology then there is no point in encouraging the use of it.
As someone born in 2001, I used to play quite a few online education games myself. I often remember as an elementary student being allowed to play on Cool Math Games when I was finished assignments in the computer lab. This was definitely one of the most exciting parts of going to the computer lab. I often found myself playing games where I could run my own little coffee shop where I could drop and raise the prices of coffee, buy stock, and sell coffee. I now realize how much money management skills I learned from that game. This game helped me learn how to budget my money and prioritize where I spent it, which could be part of the reason why I am so frugal now.
I really enjoyed watching the Kahoot which was conducted during the class time. Kahoot has always been one of my personal favourite games used for educational purposes. This game is anonymous so you do not know who gets the answers wrong but you do know how many people answered the questions wrong. This is a great tool for teachers as they are able to see what content needs to be covered more or gone over again. Students also absolutely love Kahoot, I think the music makes it very engaging, and seeing the leaderboard at the end is always a great way to motivate students to stay engaged and really think about their answers. I do not think would be the best way to assess students due to the timer on the questions but I do think this is a good way to gauge where your classes’ understanding lies.
Overall I believe that if used right educational games can be a great addition to the classroom.
That’s all for this week! Thanks for reading!
