Games in Schools Script

M1 How do we learn with games?

Hi there and welcome back. I hope that you have been enjoying and exploring some of the digital materials that we have got for you here, and also the physical materials that you can view and download from the European Schoolnet Academy pages on the Games based learning course. This is module 1 as you already know and we are on the third unit of module 1 now: How do we learn with games? I guess the important thing to say here is that one of the great things about games is that they are competitive. There is nothing wrong with a bit of competition in the schools. The problem with it of course is the good thing about computer games is that they are competitive, but also in a non-threatening way, and there is something about that actually encourages people to learn rather than scares them off the learning experience. Perhaps it would be better if I gave you an example. One oft he games that I will mention later on, it is a project that was run by The Consolarium, the former Scottish Centre for Games based learning, and they were looking at the impact of brain training on mental maths. One of the videos in the case study, which you can go away and you can view online, shows a little boy being able to do 20 mass sums in under 10 seconds. It really was quite remarkable. But the interesting thing about this is that the little boy normally would not have been very keen to do these maths sums on a piece of paper because he might be embarrassed if he got them wrong. And there is something about that kind of competitive non-threatening nature of the video game which made him want to come back and to improve, but at the same time he was not embarrassed by it. I think we have a lot to learn from games, from this and for the classroom. Why did he do this? One of the reasons he did it was he wanted to please his classroom teacher, but not being embarrassed amongst his friends, but also, we think as well that this little boy started to build up a relationship between himself and a game character, in this case Professor Kawashima. We know again from early years education that it is not unusual for young children to build up relationships with objects, for example a teddy bear. And of course all that was happening in this case was taken into the domain of a child, and he was building up a relationship with his electronic character. It really is interesting and fascinating stuff. The other interesting thing about games is the highly culturally relevance. I dont think that you will find many young children across Europe that are not interested in computer games. There might not be games for an Xbox or a PlayStation, but there might just be social games or games that are linked to apps on their mobile phones. Many of these of course are freemium and we will come back to that in module 6. So technology and in particular games is highly culturally relevant at the moment. And if we can position the games in the classroom, so children buy into it, they can be used as very powerful agents for learning and teaching. The other great thing about games is that they speak a common language. I am pretty sure that if you are watching this video and English is not your first language, you will have seen a lot

of very badly dubbed English films. The thing about a computer game is that I have never seen a badly dubbed one. In fact, computer games are produced professionally and in just about every single country of the world and they are easily animated to avoid those language barriers. The something about computer games which are a common language across children in Europe and indeed further across the world. And I can think of a real-life example of this that impacted on me back in 2010, when I took a group of young people from my school in Edinburgh over to the Alaska and we canoed a river called the Noatak. At the end of this 14-day canoe journey, we landed our canoes on the beach, ready to be flown out, and the young people that I was with also were speaking to the young people that were in the Inuit village, and they were chatting away, and they were talking about different experiences and within about 30 minutes they swapped their Xbox and Facebook IDs, and I know for a fact that they still keep in contact electronically, because of that powerful experience they went through, but at the same time the reason they were able to do that is because of the power of the video game and the power of other social networks, for example Facebook. Of course everything that I am saying here is a little bit common sense, isnt it? Because we know that games do unite people. Its why the Commonwealth Games that we have just had here in Scotland in 2014 were so important. Its why the Olympic Games, that were in Russia last year and in London before, were so important, and then of course events like the World Cup. Big sporting events, big game events bring people together. And I think that there is absolutely no reason at all why computer games could not start to bring young people together in the third millennium. And lets face it, if we start to use games as a context for discussion, hopefully good discussion will help us all become a little bit better neighbours and hopefully reduce conflict in the future as well.