[Untitled illustration of different people's hands playing a board
game. ]. CEPYMENEWS. https://cepymenews.es/la-teoria-del-game-based-learning/
Before starting this master, in which we see something related to how our future students can learn through games every single week, I had not realised about the huge amount of things anyone can learn through dynamics such as game based learning or gamification. Up to the present moment, I simply saw these kind of classes as something teachers did to give us a break from time to time.
I have to confess that I felt quite bad at one point in the class. While our teacher was explaining the topic and its benefits, he asked us ‘’Who doesn’t like to play, huh?’’ Well, I have to admit, I did not like it very much when we did something like that in class, I do not know exactly why. Maybe it was because I did not get the objective of just playing in class, now I understand that game based learning is not equivalent to playing, and, in fact, there are big differences: the first one is created for didactic purposes and is not voluntary as such; besides the goal is not just to win or to have a good time. Another possible for reason could be that I have always been really shy as a student, so I usually preferred old-fashioned lectures where students had not such an active role. Anyway, my experience as a student has led me to think how difficult it is to design these kind of dynamics well, rather, how difficult it is to design any kind of class really.
On the other hand, as a teacher or at least something similar because I am not one yet, anyway, as a Spanish assistant in France last year, I always saw myself exploring dynamics of this type to do in class with my students, even when as a student myself I had not been enthusiastic about them. And, you know what, I saw amazing results, even from those students my colleagues warned me about as they were not engaged at all. So, after last year, game based learning started to draw my attention and I started to really like it, and that was before I knew about the amount of benefits implied , such as responsibility, attention, humility, companionship and before knowing the amount of skills that can be trained through them, such as intelligence, observation, imagination, or above all, the ability to learn to decide well.
So, for a week there is no hate on my part, I declare myself a fan of this type of didactics. How can I not be?
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